


these roads will take you into your own country

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Indiana, Necrophilia, Road Trips, Swearing, Urban Legends, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-08-30 00:18:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 33,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16754230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: Here’s a joke for you: a Muslim, a zombie, and a leprechaun walk into a bar in Misery, Indiana. No one stares, because no one in the puckered, shitty asshole of Misery, Indiana gives a fuck. The Colts are playing.“Fucking new gods,” the leprechaun mutters, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears. “Gridiron and Pepsi commercials.”…or, Mad Sweeney, Laura Moon, and Salim-not-Salim get stuck on the road trip from hell. Urban legends, necrophilia, and the Midwest ensue.





	1. ON THE ROAD

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss_M](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/gifts).



 

 

 

The earth was black, but the road was blacker still.  

The road was a black ribbon laid on the skin of the earth, and it was tar-black, pitch-black; black as the inside of a man before you opened him up and revealed all that red viscera inside, like a color-change card trick. (That had been one of Shadow Moon’s favorites, even when Laura stopped smiling at it.)

It had always been there, the black road. Even before they poured asphalt onto the skin of the prairie and beat it flat; even then, the black road was there. Cleared for rail-right-of-ways, or soft tracks carved by wagon wheels. Before that, a fever dream of the Northwest Passage—though eventually they gave up looking for that one, just broke the Americas in two; one sharp _snap_ at the weakest point of the wishbone.

You could ask Mr. Nancy, he remembers. It was his people’s blood that went into the cement, wetted the gates of bright steel. He could tell you stories of the black road when it was _black_ , motherfucker, black as the bodies that moved the fucking earth. Panama Canal! Wonder of the modern world! You think your precious Jesus Christo could pull off that shit? Hell no, he just _walked_ on water; Compé Anansi was the one who taught his children to catch the sea in a net, make it dance to the jangling of locks.

(...what? The road was always black.

No one ever said it was always a road.)

But here, and now, in this place, the road was a road. It was a highway, and the highway was black too, with the chemical smell of new asphalt. Jacob’s ladder smoothed out over the new country; a new heaven at the other end. Lined with yellow and a siren song of reflective signs, all crooning _WEST_ and _WEST_. Following the sun.

Sweeney squinted against it, that sun. There was a bird wheeling in wide, lazy circles above where they’d stopped—a red-tailed, maybe, though it was hard to make out anything but the shape of it against the sky. He shut his eyes and let his head tip back, the smell of the sun and asphalt everywhere in his head. It was missing only the tang of saltwater and he might have been back in a ship’s berth—black tar and sun on salt; the pull of a thing hoped-for. The old world was behind, hardened into clay and iron, but ahead—

“You’re pissing on your shoes, you know.”

Sweeney opened his eyes and swore. When he turned, Dead Wife was leaning against the side of the taxi, watching him. She was smoking a fresh cigarette, and at his look she grinned.

She had a too-wide mouth, Dead Wife did; like a razor wound. It made her look dead. Deader.

Sweeney turned back and shook the last drops from his dick, zipped up his fly. She was still looking at him when he turned back. The sun was too bright for her here, it made the slouch of skin and the thinning hair too obvious. She could have been a thing dredged up from the water, fishbelly pale.

“If you wanted an eyeful, you might have asked,” he said, walking across the interstate and back toward where the taxi had pulled off. There was the brief shiver as he stepped over the median—ley lines had fallen out of fashion in the last few decades, but there was always some power in the edges of things. New moons and lintels and the state line, looking both ways before you crossed the street.

(The old Roman roads were eight feet wide where straight and twice that where curved; America liked sets of twelve. But the road is always a line, black, running down the middle.)

Sweeney stopped in front of Dead Wife. She had to tilt her head up to meet his gaze. “I could sue you for sexual harassment, Dead Wife.”

She took a drag of the cigarette, eying him. After a too-long moment, she exhaled—Sweeney jerked away, still managing to taste ash in the back of his throat.

When he looked back, Dead Wife had cocked her head, smiling a bright, winsome smile as false as the color in her cheeks. “If I decide to harass you, sugar tits, you’ll know.”

Sweeney snorted. Deliberately, he wiped his hands on the front of her shirt. Her body gave under his palms, soft and overripe; flesh already sliding from her bones. “Feeling bloated and tender, Wifey?” he asked. “Must be that time of the month.”

“You’re disgusting,” Dead Wife said. Behind her teeth, her tongue was grey.

“Pots and kettles.”

She didn’t say anything to that, and Sweeney moved past her, to the other side of the taxi. He had to bend down to fit himself into the rear seat again; already his knees ached. He huffed, leaning forward to rap on the plastic barrier. “C’mon, Ibrahim bin Irem; let’s get a move on. People to see, things to do...”

“You are the one who asked to stop,” Ibrahim bin Irem muttered.

Dead Wife leaned down, peering at the both of them through the side window. “I’m not finished with my cigarette.”

“Finish it in the cab.”

“I would prefer she finished it here,” Ibrahim bin Irem said firmly.

“Your cab smells of shit and eau de fucking _corpse_ , is a cigarette really going to impact quality of life that much?”

“Yes,” Ibrahim said, and his hands spasmed around the wheel, knuckles going pale. Sweeney didn’t think Ibrahim bin Irem had it in him, the bloody lovesong—not like Shadow Moon, stinking of iron bars and funeral dirt; violence looking for an object. But then, Ibrahim was good and proper god-fucked, wasn’t he? No telling what a man would do for faith.

(Sweeney had been a king, once, and he’d drowned his offerings to Badb in the bog, willow hurdles for coffin lids. A man would do a lot of things on faith, that was what it meant.)

“Well, all right then,” Sweeney muttered, shifting to lay across the seat. The shit smell was worse, lower down, but his knees hurt less this way.

For a moment, they all listened to the gust of Ibrahim bin Irem’s breathing, the occasional far-off sound of birds calling to one another. A livestock truck thundered past, smelling of diesel—headed east, and Sweeney saw the way Dead Wife’s shoulders tensed, watching it.

“Tell me something, Salim-not-Salim,” Dead Wife said suddenly. All Sweeney could see of her through the window was her shoulder, a shifting glimpse of an ear, half a jaw; throat.

“Tell you what?” Ibrahim bin Irem asked.

“How do you know which direction it’s in?” Dead Wife took a drag from her cigarette, Sweeney could hear the labored, artificial breath of it. “Mecca, I mean. The Earth is round, right? You could pray in—any direction.”

“In New York it was southeast,” Ibrahim said. He was running his palms along the smooth curve of the wheel, as though he were imagining the globe there, cradled between his hands. What Sweeney could see of his face was smoothed out, empty of emotion. “That way was closest, the shortest distance a bird could fly to the Kaaba.”

“But you could pray west, is what I’m saying.”

Ibrahim smiled a little, murmuring something in Arabic. “East or West is not righteousness,” he said finally. His hands spanned the curve of the wheel, the whole world. “Faith in Allah is righteousness.”

Ibrahim bin Irem said this without reverence—plain as day, true as the Earth being round, and Sweeney couldn’t stop his eyes from fluttering shut. It wasn’t for him, wasn’t his to taste, but he breathed in through his nose anyway. His throat filled up with copper and something thick, sweet perfume and musk. (Then it was gone, never there to begin with. But he had forgotten how it tasted— _that_ sort of faith, so unshaking it became prosaic. The unthinking thought that made up the fabric of the world. It was enough to make your goddamn toes curl.)

“This bothers you,” Ibrahim said suddenly, and Dead Wife made a dismissive noise.

“It’s none of my business. He’s your god.”

Sweeney snorted.

Even with his eyes shut, he could feel when Dead Wife turned to look at him—could almost picture the exact way she had narrowed her eyes, sticking her chin out like a spade. She was probably still smoking, pretending she was a real girl, with real lungs that wanted air and all those fiddly pathways in her brain begging for nicotine.

He’d bet she couldn’t even taste the damn things.

“What’s so funny, shit-for-brains?” Dead Wife demanded.

Sweeney opened his eyes. Her expression was just as he’d guessed. “‘He’s your god,’” Sweeney echoed scornfully, making a _tch_ sound against his teeth. “Like yours is much better.”

“I don’t have any gods.”

She said it with a straight face. Sweeney laughed.

“I don’t believe in _shit_.”

“All right, Dead Wife. Whatever you say,” Sweeney answered sweetly, just to see if he could get her to bristle a little more, to look at him with hooded, flat eyes. Like her mouth, her eyes made her look dead. Deader.

She opened her razor-wound of a mouth, and—

“Enough,” Ibrahim bin Irem said, and to Sweeney’s surprise Dead Wife shut her mouth with a click of teeth. Then looked annoyed with herself for it.

Sweeney grinned, but she wasn’t looking at him any more. She was looking at Ibrahim, and whatever she saw on his face was enough to make her sigh, and push herself up off the taxi, stepping away. Sweeney couldn’t see what she did, but a few minutes later she was back, sliding into the passenger seat.

“Kentucky, then,” she said. Sweeney couldn’t see her face, not properly, but the shell of her ear was a dull grey in the light.

He turned his face away, and shut his eyes.

Sweeney could taste the moment that the taxi pulled back onto the road. It wasn’t quite faith, not that heady copper-and-musk, but cousin to it. Close. Humans were messy with their belief, they spilled it over onto everything, into everything; only sometimes they made gods. But even absent a god, there was power in an object that was the focus of belief. A prayer wheel set in motion, or bread and milk left on a windowsill—that’s what a car on the highway was. An object of belief. (Sweeney knew too much about belief that wasn’t quite faith, and the degree of difference between an object and a god. He screwed his eyes tighter shut, and willed himself to sleep.)

The bird was following them south-southeast. Against the sky, it too was black.

 

//

 

Sweeney woke to silence, an absence of sound where there had been the whine of the engine and the undercurrent hum of wheels on asphalt. It was nice that way, he thought, still half-asleep and delirious with it. To be in the quiet, nothing to stare at but the faded grey felt of the roof of the cab and no thought in his head but to breathe. Maybe this was what death would be like—proper death, the kind that came after a battle and stayed, wrapped you up and took you away on bird’s wings. He didn’t think he’d mind dying, if it was quiet.

It took another minute—two, if he was being honest—to realize what that silence meant.

Sweeney sat upright so quickly he nearly brained himself on the stupid too-low ceiling. “What’s the bleeding hold-up this time?”

“I...don’t know,” Ibrahim bin Irem said, frowning at the steering wheel. He glanced over at Dead Wife, who continued to stare at the dashboard, her head cocked.

“I think it stalled. The engine just—died.”

“And the brakes would not work,” Ibrahim said, and as the only one among them who could die properly, offered Sweeney a stricken look in the rearview mirror. “We are very lucky we rolled to a stop.”

“Fucking Christ,” Sweeney ground out. “And I suspect neither of you have any skill at repairing these things.”

Dead Wife turned to fix Sweeney with a look, her eyes going hooded and flat again. “Are you an expert then? Hearts, stars, horseshoes and lug wrenches?”

“Yeah, I’ve got mine in my pocket, why don’t you reach in and give it a squeeze,” Sweeney said sweetly, and then ducked when she reached back to grab at him.

It took fifteen minutes and only a very little bit of shouting for Ibrahim to diplomatically suggest that the work ought to be left to Sweeney, and for Dead Wife to give in. By then, they were standing around the taxi’s open hood, Ibrahim scowling at the transmission as Dead Wife scowled at Sweeney. He attempted to ignore both of them and get on with his business.

“Fine,” Dead Wife finally said, though it sounded like something ground out from between her teeth. “I’m going to smoke, then.”

“No one gives a fuck,” Sweeney announced cheerfully. Dead Wife didn’t turn or break stride, just lifted a hand and flipped him off.

Beside Sweeney, Ibrahim sighed and muttered something in Arabic before turning away himself. Sweeney snorted, and set to work.

There was a set of dusty tools in the boot of the cab, and Sweeney made good use of them, ruling out first the battery and then the ignition switch. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, all told—he’d taught himself the language of locks and alarm systems and then stopped, since there was little point in stealing a car that wouldn’t run. But a man couldn’t make his way across America without picking up something about how the infernal machines were put together, and Sweeney was good at nothing so much as collecting bits and bobs and storing them away. (An unfortunate side-effect of the leprechaun business. It was lucky he was a wandering sort; Sweeney strongly suspected that he would turn any place he settled into a hoarder’s nest.)

In truth, he prefered horses to cars. When Sweeney was still Suibhne, they’d worshipped Echraide, the rider—slaughtering a white stallion and praying over its blood for her to come swiftly, to bless their journeys and keep their horses hale. He imagined Echraide was long forgotten now, plowed under by the Roman church, and then the automotive industry. Even Epona had given up after the Model A rolled off the assembly line; she’d been the first to take the deal the New Gods offered, Sweeney knew, and turn herself into something new for a new world.

Sweeney had seen her once, in Detroit—only at a distance, but close enough to admire the sharp cut of her suit. (For a moment, the air had smelled like hay and horseshit and the harvest, and Sweeney had only just stopped himself from going to his knees.) He imagined her title was something nondescript, VP North American Division, but Sweeney heard she’d been the one to design the original Mustang, back in the sixties. They called them _pony cars_ after her.

(Sweeney believed it. Goddess of fertility and protector of horses, and he believed it a little more every time he saw that silver stallion, flashing white in the American sun.)

After a good half hour of poking at the taxi’s transmission, several different valves, and some other metal-y bits that he’d never caught the name of, Sweeney sighed and leaned his hands flat against header.

The problem with the taxi, as far as he could tell, was that there was no problem.

Every bit of it was in working order—rundown, beat-up, piece-of-shit order, but order all the same. There was no reason for the brakes not to work, though when Sweeney had wedged himself into the driver’s seat and given them an experimental pump, it was if the line had been cut clean through. There was no reason for the engine not to turn over, yet it _hadn’t_ , each and every time Sweeney ground the keys in the ignition.

He dropped his chin to his chest, shutting his eyes. Sweeney missed horses, he decided; they had been stupid flighty bastards, prone to biting, but you knew where you stood with horses.

He was vaguely aware of Dead Wife and Ibrahim moving around him, the sound of the taxi doors opening and shutting again. Dead Wife had taken up a spot a few yards away, but not so far that Sweeney couldn’t hear her smoking—that same infuriating, artificial inhale and exhale. (It made Sweeney want to shake her, take her by the shoulders and snarl, _stop pretending, stop trying to fool whoever it is you’re trying to fool; you’re not a real girl and I doubt you ever were_.)

“Where are we, anyway?” she asked suddenly, and Sweeney almost startled. He opened his mouth to ask how the hell he was supposed to know, when Ibrahim bin Irem cleared his throat. Sweeney hadn’t realized they were both out there, or so close.

“Near to Ohio, I think,” Ibrahim answered. “But the map from the gas station is difficult to read, the print is very small. The border is—up ahead somewhere, close.”

“No phone?” Dead Wife asked, and Ibrahim laughed.

“I left it in the pocket of my other life.”

Dead Wife huffed, something that was almost a laugh. “Yeah, mine too.”

They lapsed into silence and Sweeney realized for the first time just how _quiet_ it was. Aside from the hum of insects and the wind over the fields, there was nothing. Not a single car had driven past in all the time they’d been sitting here; Sweeney hadn’t clocked any houses on the horizon, not even a barn. If the taxi really was well and fucked, they’d have to walk it. Maybe there was a town near enough, Sweeney could—

“I’ve never left Indiana before,” Dead Wife said suddenly, quiet enough that Sweeney knew it wasn’t for him. Ibrahim made a soft noise. “Not really. I mean, we took some bullshit school trips to Chicago, and my family went to Disney World once, but...I’ve never _left_ , the kind where you’re not planning on coming back.”

There was a silence. “I was sick in the airport bathroom in Muscat,” Ibrahim bin Irem said, his voice soft too. “And again, going through immigration at JFK. I thought I was ill, like when a man gets a new kidneys: a transplant. I had cut my country out of my body, and tried to fit America in its place.”

“I’m sorry you can’t go back, Salim.”

“It gets—” Ibrahim fell silent. “I will not say easier. It is not easier; I am still sick, this country does not fit like the old one did. But I suppose you get used to it. Even the ache, you can get used to that. You can breathe American air with Omani lungs; I am proof.”

Sweeney straightened up so suddenly he banged his head on the hood. “ _Ow,_ fucking—what did you say?”

Dead Wife and Ibrahim startled, turning to look at him with identical expressions. Like lovers, Sweeney though, caught out and trying to smile like nothing was happening. Dead Wife’s smile was crueler, though, the corner of her mouth tucked in like she was pitying and laughing at him in equal measure. (Sweeney wondered if that made him the cuckold, and then hated her, for making him think it.)

“I said it does not get any easier,” Ibrahim answered, and Sweeney shook his head, still clutching that bit of his skull that had collided with the hood latch.

“No, you said your...whatever lungs, like they belonged to your old country.”

Ibrahim bin Irem looked to Dead Wife, who shrugged. “I suppose,” Ibrahim said. “But it is only an expression—”

“A fucking shit one, is what it is. _Imeacht go fánach ort féin is ar do chnapán miúlach,_ ” Sweeney cursed, grabbing the hood and slamming it shut, so hard the whole car shuddered. He did it a few more times, just until the wave of fury had ebbed slightly. He wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him, that Dead Wife was dead, her bones had gone into the earth. She’d come to rest in a grave, however briefly; a grave made by men’s hands in the same black earth that had made her, birthed her. She’d been returned to sender, signed, sealed and delivered.

No wonder the car had stopped dead before the state line. Dead Wife might claim she had no gods, but gods were generally quite clear on what was theirs to claim.

“ _Ualach sé chapall de chré na húire ort_ ,” Sweeney muttered, eying Dead Wife. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“What now?”

“End of the line for you, Wifey,” Sweeney said, and Dead Wife’s expression flickered, surprise and something almost like fear passing in swift succession across her face. But then they were gone, quick as they came, and she lifted her chin, fixed him with one of her dead-eyed looks.

“What did you say to me?”

“I said: this is the end of the line. You can’t come to Kentucky, or—anywhere else for that matter. You’re stuck in the great state of Indiana, Dead Wife; stuck until your skin sloughs off your bones and that last spark of life gutters out. You fucked the car though, so thanks for that.”

“You’re crazy. You think I had anything to do with this?” she asked, gesturing to the taxi. Beside her, Ibrahim was silent, his eyes darting between Sweeney and Dead Wife like they were wild animals with their teeth out, and too close to him for comfort.

“Oh, I know you did,” Sweeney said. “The minute you had us turn west instead of south, the minute you brought us back to this patch of dirt, you fucked yourself and us with you.”

“How do you figure that one?”

“You were born in Indiana.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Then you died in Indiana. You lived your whole—shitty little life in Indiana, and never left. If genie-fucker over here belongs to whatever patch of godforsaken desert he’s from, then you belong to Indy-fucking-ana.”

“You’re really testing my patience here. Get to the _point._ ”

“The dead can’t own things, remember that? The dead are things, things to be owned. Indiana owns you, Laura Moon, and now that it’s got you back it’s clearly not prepared to let you go. As evidenced by how it _fucked_ our _ride_.”

Dead Wife’s mouth moved soundlessly for a moment. Finally, she made a high, frustrated noise, throwing her hands up. “That’s...insane. You’re insane, that’s insane, it’s a—it’s a state! it’s just some lines on a map, it can’t do anything, it can’t own anything; it’s not even alive—”

“Like you’re not alive?” Sweeney shot back, and Dead Wife flinched, falling silent.

He watched her throat work as she swallowed, though that seemed like one of those things that was more habit than purposeful; he didn’t think there was anything for her to swallow. “Okay. Okay, sure, the state of Indiana is alive and it owns me and is keeping me under house arrest. How do we fix it?”

“Fuck if I know.”

She made an outraged noise, but Sweeney only shrugged. “Not my area. I deal in gods, Dead Wife, not mystical geography.”

“So how do you even know it’s the mystical geography in the first place?”

Sweeney gestured to the road ahead, where presumably the Indiana state line lingered, an invisible and burning gate she could not pass. “Go on then, keep walking. See how far you get.”

The look she gave him was poisonous. With a final, furious drag, she dropped her cigarette to the pavement, grinding it out under her toe like she was pretending it was Sweeney’s face. Then she lifted her chin and started walking away along the highway, heading east.

Ibrahim looked sidelong at Sweeney, as though waiting for some reaction—for Sweeney to call her back, maybe, as though that was likely—but Sweeney only shook his head with a sigh. He settled back against the taxi, crossing his arms across his chest. “Give it a minute, Ibrahim.”

Places had a power of their own, like roads, like all objects humans spilled their messy faith into and over. Sweeney’s people had believed that the land belonged to the aes sídhe, and so no one was terribly surprised when sheep went missing near the mounds, or a pretty girl went into the woods and never came out. America had it worse—pitted with Indian curses and sacred places, bottomless holes and towns where gravity stopped; half a dozen forests men disappeared into, or came out of raving about monsters. Sweeney had met Grimnir his second century in America, the both of them sitting at a diner counter in the shit-end of New Mexico as some lunatic ranted about little green men.

( _What brings you, Old One?_ Sweeney had asked, and Grimnir had smiled, a smile as kind as the gallows. _The miracle of life, of course. I always like being there for the birth of a new religion._ )

Ibrahim bin Irem made a noise, and Sweeney blinked, pulled out of his thoughts. A couple hundred yards along the road, Dead Wife had stopped dead, her feet planted on either side of the center line and hands fisted at her sides. A fighter’s stance, and yet she looked very small, set against the black road and the blue of the sky.

She was too far away to be sure, but Sweeney thought he could see her shaking. (He was glad, and guilty of it at the same time.)

Sweeney cupped his hands around his mouth. “Everything all right there? I think Ohio’s a bit further—”

Dead Wife whirled around so quickly that Sweeney was startled into dropping his hands and taking half a step backward. Then she was marching back towards them, and he barely had enough time to straighten up and plant his own feet on the asphalt. Even Ibrahim looked panicky as Dead Wife strode past him, but she couldn’t have noticed: her eyes were locked unwaveringly on Sweeney.

And she didn’t _stop,_ not until she was crowding close enough that Sweeney could smell the formaldehyde and cigarettes on her breath. She fisted a hand in his shirt, and Sweeney resisted the urge to laugh as the ridge of her knuckles dug into his sternum. He’d give her this: Laura Moon knew the bloody lovesong at least as well as her husband did. She stank of funeral dirt too, and was clearly itching for a fight with something she could lay hands on.

He was oh so very tempted to give her one.

“Asshole,” Laura Moon spat. “You cocksucking—”

“That’s your hobby, Dead Wife, not mine. And if you’ll recall, _I_ wanted to go to Kentucky,” Sweeney said. “This little homecoming parade was your idea.”

“Fuck you.”

Sweeney reached down and pried her hand from his shirt-front. She bared her teeth at him, but he only smiled, sickly sweet. “Well. It was nice knowing you, the late Laura Moon, but we’ve got places to be. C’mon Ibrahim, grab the map and let’s get to walking.”

Ibrahim made a strangled noise. “I don’t—” Ibrahim said, taking a step back and holding out his hands as though to ward Sweeney off. He kept looking frantically to Laura Moon as though she might save him, say something to stop them. But Laura was still looking at Sweeney, unwavering, her mouth cruel and her eyes dead, dead, dead. Hooded and flat as a snake’s.

Ibrahim swallowed. “I just do not understand why you will need me, if there is no car to drive.”

“You want to find your jinn, Ibrahim bin Irem? Ask fewer questions.”

Sweeney didn’t wait for an answer, just started walking, towards the supposed state line. A minute later, Ibrahim was scrambling to match Sweeney’s strides, clutching the hastily-folded map. Sweeney could see Kentucky, staring up from one of the folds. It was sickly green, Frankfort marked with a red dot.

“I do not like you,” Ibrahim muttered, and Sweeney grinned even wider.

They had barely made it a dozen steps when Dead Wife called out: “Hey, so you don’t want your coin back, then?” and—

Sweeney stopped dead.

He’d forgot. He’d _forgot_ , and for a moment Sweeney was so—he could taste blood, copper in his throat, on his tongue. He felt light-headed, the kind of light-headed he used to get before a battle, where all things were very hard, and clear, and the only noise was the blood in his own ears.

Very slowly, he turned to face Dead Wife. She was smirking faintly with that fucking awful razor wound of a mouth, and at his stare she crossed her arms over her chest, lifting her eyebrows in a silent challenge.

“I’ll wait,” Sweeney said slowly, resisting the urge to lunge for her and—“That flesh’ll slide off your bones soon enough. I’ll come back when you’re cooked through, and pluck my coin from your guts like the prize from a cereal box.”

“If you say so,” Dead Wife said. She was still smirking; Sweeney wondered if he’d be able to get close enough to tear those bloodless lips from her gums. “But personally, I think if that was an option, you would have left me at that motel. Why else are we headed to Kentucky, why all the urgency? I think you’re on a deadline, Lucky Charms, and you need my coin before then.”

“ _My_ coin,” Sweeney snapped, and then kicked himself for it when her smirk deepened.

The silence between them stretched on, tight as razorwire. Finally, Sweeney breathed in through his nose, shutting his eyes briefly and cursing every year he spent in the trees, one by one.

When he opened them again, Dead Wife was still there. Pity.

“All right,” he said through gritted teeth. “All right. I don’t know _how_ , you psychotic gowl, but—it’ll be sorted. Somehow.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Dead Wife said with a bullshit smile.

Silence fell. The wind over the fields seemed very loud in it, the rustling of soybean plants and corn the rushing of the whole sea. The sun was bright and the sky went on in every direction, and yet Sweeney couldn’t shake the sense of being in that ship’s berth again. Coming to America over the waves, iron behind and the road ahead—

“We passed a town, not so long ago,” Ibrahim bin Irem volunteered quietly, glancing between Sweeney and Dead Wife. “It was not very big, and the map does not label it, but there is likely a mechanic there.”

“One that knows how to unfuck a magically fucked taxi?” Sweeney asked, and Ibrahim shot him a dirty look. It was an eloquent look, that invited Sweeney to fuck himself with a jagged instrument, or suggest a more constructive solution. “I’m just saying we might as well steal a different car—maybe even one that doesn’t smell like shit. Live the high life.”

Ibrahim’s look went downright vicious. “We could, yes. But I am not so careless as you, to lose or abandon my gifts,” Ibrahim said.

Sweeney blinked, and then raised his eyebrows pointedly. Ibrahim only smiled a tight, unamused smile, and began walking back the way they had come.

Sweeney hadn’t realized that Dead Wife was standing at his shoulder until she said, “He’s got you there.” He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, and she wasn’t smiling. Her mouth was still a razor wound.

“ _Briseadh agus brú ort, a bhitseach bheag_ ,” Sweeney said, trying for a curse and mostly just sounding tired.

“Yeah, well. Fuck you too, asshole,” Dead Wife said, brushing past him and following Ibrahim bin Irem back into Indiana.  


 

 

 


	2. MISERY, INDIANA

  
  


Here’s a joke for you: a Muslim, a zombie, and a leprechaun walk into a bar in Misery, Indiana. No one stares, because no one in the puckered, shitty asshole of Misery, Indiana gives a fuck. The Colts are playing.

They get a table near the back. (That isn’t part of the joke, that’s just what happens.)

“Fucking new gods,” the leprechaun mutters after a few minutes of awkward silence, hunching his shoulders almost up to his ears. “Gridiron and Pepsi commercials...”

“What makes a god new?” the Muslim asks. His tone is mostly thoughtful, as though he’s not asking so much as thinking aloud. “Surely all gods were new once, when they were first born. Or made? Are gods born or made?”

“More importantly, how can my feet hurt?” the zombie says. Her voice is muffled in the crook of her arm. “Every nerve in them is dead, they shouldn’t be able to hurt.”

“We need a plan,” the leprechaun sighs, running a hand through his hair. He throws a last dirty look at the television, then turns to face the other two fully. “We didn’t pass any auto repair shops, but I’m sure someone here is a mechanic. Or drunk enough to recommend one to an out-of-town stranger.”

The zombie lifts her head, sighing. “Fine, I’ll go.”

The leprechaun scoffs. “No offense, Dead Wife, but you’re starting to look the wrong side of turned meat. And I’m pretty sure that most of these culchies have never known anyone darker than skim milk, so Ibrahim is right out.”

The Muslim pulls a face. The zombie opens her mouth to argue, but only sighs and puts her head down again. “I’m too tired. Bring me vodka.”

“Coffee, with sugar,” the Muslim says.

The leprechaun mutters something that might be Irish and is definitely insulting, before getting up and moving to the bar.

After about half an hour, the leprechaun returns. “Fuck this,” he says, slamming down the glass of vodka and the coffee cup with a clatter, enough to spill some of both onto the table. He slides into his seat, scowling. “These backwoods cocksuckers are useless. One of them told me to go to fucking  _ Jiffy Lube _ .”

(The second part of the joke is observational humor:  _ what is the deal with Mad Sweeney? _ The punchline is that it’s been at least a hundred years since he had a conversation with an ordinary person—longer, if you didn’t count ‘threats of violence’ or ‘waving gold in their face’ as conversation. He’s forgotten how, mostly. It explains about him.

...observational humor isn’t as funny as a good ‘walks into a bar’ joke.)

The Colts score a touchdown. The leprechaun, zombie, and Muslim don’t even look up.

“So what do we do?” the Muslim asks, when the cheers and applause come down to a reasonable level again.

“We leave your shitty taxi where it is, and steal the first car we like,” the leprechaun answers wearily. He’s rubbing his thumb along an old groove in the table, part of a  _ charlotte & charlie, 1998,  _ scratched into the wood. He is thinking about another name, carved long ago and buried deep in the rings of an oak tree in Virginia.

“Then you can drive yourselves to Kentucky,” the Muslim says, reaching for the coffee. “I am not leaving my taxi. I will find the jinn some other way.”

“There has to be something,” the zombie says. She straightened up when the vodka arrived, and is sipping it slowly, staring off into the middle distance. (Now that she’s dead, all of it is sipping vodka. Paint thinner included.) “It’s a small town in Indiana, there has to be some guy who builds dodgy custom cars in his barn. It’s practically state law.”

“Well, then no one wants to tell me about it.”

“Let me give it a try,” the zombie says. “You’re…”

She trails off into silence. The leprechaun raises his eyebrows. “I’m what, Dead Wife?”

“I was going to say ‘an asshole.’”

“Pot. Kettle.”

“Fuck off.”

(The zombie is thinking about Audrey, the cruel certainty of her saying,  _ Shadow deserves better than you _ . Looking out the window and having no response to it.)

Only the Muslim notices when the bartender approaches the table. He gives her a weary smile. “Is there something you need?” he asks, loud enough to be heard over the bickering. The zombie straightens up, elbowing the leprechaun sharply in the ribs; he doubles over until his forehead is on the sticky table, wheezing.

The bartender is slim and nervous-looking, pretty in a small town sort of way. Her hair hangs very straight and brown, and she cowers behind it. (She isn’t part of the joke either, she just works here.) “I heard...your friend was looking for a mechanic,” she says warily.

The Muslim nods. “Yes, we are. But it is a—difficult problem, we cannot take it to an ordinary repair shop. Do you know someone who can help us?”

“Wilbur’s Automotive,” the bartender says in a rush. Behind the curtain of hair, her eyes are feverish. “You take Hickey to North, it’s right there at the crossroads. If you have...the kind of car trouble ordinary places won’t fix, that’s where to go. It’s a place for the weird stuff.”

The leprechaun had straightened up again, and was studying the waitress thoughtfully. “Why didn’t any of your fellow denizens tell me about it, then?”

“People don’t go there, not if they can help it. They say it’s haunted.”

“And you?” the zombie asks. “What do you say?”

The bartender smiles thinly. “There are worse things in this world than the dead.”

The zombie huffs, some bitter version of a laugh. “Can’t argue with you there. What was the car trouble you were dealing with, anyway?”

“It was the brakes,” the bartender says. “The stubborn things, they just—kept  _ working _ every time my husband drove to his mistress’ house.”

The Muslim chokes on a mouthful of coffee, and splutters, coughing. The zombie and the leprechaun immediately look to the bartender’s hands. She’s not wearing a wedding ring.

“He passed away last fall,” the bartender says, noticing their stares. “Car accident.”

The bartender turns to go, but then stops suddenly. She looks back at them over her shoulder. “Just...as a last thing? Be careful. Their prices are steep, and I’m not sure what they’d do to someone who couldn’t pay.”

(The last part of the joke is this, mostly for the dramatic irony:

“Murder, price gouging, and a cheating spouse. Sounds  _ perfect _ ,” the leprechaun says, and steals the zombie’s vodka.)

 

//

 

Wilbur’s Automotive was—as Dead Wife put it when they turned a corner, and the squat white building came into view—a goddamn shithole. 

“I do not care what it looks like, if they can repair the taxi,” Ibrahim said, but he grimaced at the faded ‘ _ WILBUR SHAW AUTOMOTIVE REPAIR, TEST EVALUATIONS & MISCELLANEY’  _ sign. There had once been other signs below it, but Sweeney could barely make out more than a worn-away outline of ‘ _ TIRES’  _ and a flaking ‘ _ SALE, HAL    F OIL’.  _ There was a small placard tacked onto the signpost that was just lone exclamation point, drifting in white space.

Unfortunately, Wilbur’s seemed to get worse the closer they got.

“She did say this was the place for weird,” Sweeney said, kicking at a random coil lying in the gravel. The lot around the building was full of squat, old-fashioned racing cars—most of them more rust than car.. They were arranged in careful rows, almost as though their drivers had parked them there, and then just...forgot to come back for a century or so.

The sight made Sweeney uneasy. The shape of the old cars, maybe, arranged in that way: it was too much like coffins laid out for burying.

“Weird or not, let’s get this over with,” Dead Wife said.

“Isn’t it strange that there is no garage?” Ibrahim said as he and Sweeney followed behind Dead Wife towards the front doors. “You would think a car shop, it would have a large garage, or many garages. But the building is small, and there is only this one entrance...”

Ibrahim trailed off, sounding uncertain.

Sweeney had never thought to try and imagine what a mechanic’s shop would look like—automotive problems were for those unlucky bastards who couldn’t hotwire a car. But if he had thought about it for a second, Wilbur’s Automotive wouldn’t have been far off. There were four grey walls, made even greyer by the harsh fluorescent lighting. On the right, a large sign reading  _ WILBUR’S AUTOMOTIVE  _ blinked dimly; opposite it, a bulletin board with yellowing posters and a calendar turned to the wrong month. At the back of the room was a nondescript door, labeled ‘BACK OFFICE - EMPLOYEES ONLY’ in blocky lettering. The rest of the room was greying plastic chairs, arranged along the walls.

There was only a single, high service counter, also grey. It stood between them and the back office door. There was a concierge bell sitting on top, gleaming silver in the light.

Sweeney shied away from it, instinctively. He was already on edge—this fucking place, it  _ itched _ —the last thing he needed was for bells to start ringing out. (Sweeney’s relationship to his past was thready, uncertain thing, but he was sure that Saint fucking Ronan had been a cunt and his curse waas worse. Sweeney couldn’t even push a goddamn doorbell without breaking out in a cold sweat, fighting off the overwhelming desire to open his arms and take to the trees.)

Dead Wife was already halfway to the counter by the time Sweeney caught up to her. He still had to grab at her arm and haul her hand away.

“Hold on,” Sweeney gritted out. “Ground rules,” he said, and Dead Wife blinked.

“What?”

“Ground rules for dealing with what may or may not be supernatural shit. No giving out the names you were born with—you’re Ibrahim and she’s Mrs. Moon, all right? Don’t agree to anything without checking with me first. And no  _ mentioning  _ the supernatural shit,” Sweeney said. It was strange to hold someone’s wrist and feel no pulse, for their skin to be cool to the touch. “Understood? We don’t know who these people are, so we don’t tell them any more than absolutely necessary.”

“You said the taxi—”

“Let them figure it out. If they don’t know, they don’t know.”

“Fine,” Dead Wife said, yanking her wrist out of his grip. “Whatever.”

Sweeney leveled Ibrahim with a look. “That goes for you too, Ibrahim bin Irem,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets. “No jinn talk. No talk, if you can help it.”

Sweeney braced himself, clenching his jaw so tightly he might break a tooth and fisting his hands in his pockets. Only then did he give a short nod to Dead Wife, who rolled her eyes and rang the bell. 

“Maybe it is broken?” Ibrahim asked when it made only an abortive  _ clink  _ noise and fell silent. Sweeney was just about to relax when Dead Wife hummed irritably, and slammed her hand down on the bell again.

The deafening wail of a car horn filled the room.

All of them jumped at the sound, and both Sweeney and Dead Wife swore loudly. Even Ibrahim let out a stream of Arabic that sounded like it could be either a prayer, or some very emphatic cursing; it was hard to tell. 

“I do not like this place at all,” he added said when the noise died out.

Sweeney was inclined to agree. Everything about this was strange,  _ off  _ by some small degree he couldn’t place or explain—and strange was Sweeney’s business. Until a dead girl ran off with his coin, Sweeney hadn’t been surprised by anything in nearly a century. Since then, it seemed he’d been nothing but.

Still, the mechanic that came bustling through the back office door a moment later was anything but strange or surprising. Like the office, he was what Sweeney imagined in trying to picture a mechanic. He even wore the jumpsuit—’Wilbur’s’ embroidered onto the breast, grease streaked on the trousers. When he smiled, the apples of his cheeks went rounded and pink.

“Welcome to Wilbur’s Auto,” the mechanic said cheerfully. “What can we do you for?”

“We’re having some—unique car trouble,” Dead Wife said, propping her elbows on the counter. In the fluorescent light, she looked even more dead, the kind of dead that you only saw in long-time junkies, or maybe nineteenth century chorus girls with consumption. “We were told that you specialize in that sort of thing.”

“Unique car trouble is what we do,” the mechanic said. “You need a tow? You didn’t drive up.”

“Yes,” Ibrahim said, jostling Sweeney to stand beside Dead Wife at the counter. “It is a taxi with New York plates, we left it by the side of the road. Mile marker one ninety.”

The young man nodded, jotting down their answers and asked a few more questions, but Sweeney had stopped listening.

He couldn’t always tell, when he was talking to a—thing like him. Gods wore it differently: Grimnir stank of power, even when he wasn’t trying to, and Ostara trailed a heady intoxication that was hardly subtle; standing next to Mr. Nancy was like edging towards a furnace close to boiling over. But on the next step down, it wasn’t always clear who was what. (He’d once spent an embarrassing half-hour chatting up a succubus, something he hadn’t realized until she put her hand on his arm and said,  _ You seem nice, but I’m not into eating my own kind. _ )

Still, Sweeney stared at the smiling young mechanic, a picture of ruddy corn-fed health, and he knew: “You’re dead.”

The mechanic blinked, and then barked out a laugh. “Hey, you’ve got a good eye! Usually it takes a lot longer for folks to notice. But yeah, I am, I’ve been gone—oh, sixty years this May.”

There was a brief silence.

“You seem very...not dead, for a dead man,” Ibrahim said, frowning. He had stepped back from counter, and was eying the mechanic warily.

“Well, I wasn’t going to mention it, but your friend there seems pretty undead herself,” the young mechanic said, nodding at Dead Wife, who bristled. “And she looks closer to sixty years gone than I do, if I’m being honest.”

Dead Wife’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Be less honest.”

The mechanic chuckled. “You can call me Pat. So do you folks really have car trouble, or was that an ingenious smokescreen for introductions?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “No, no. That taxi is mine, it is...very important to me. If you can fix it, please do.”

“And you?” Pat asked Dead Wife. “Is the taxi important to you?” 

She blinked in surprise, and then looked sideways at Sweeney.

“We...I need to get to Kentucky,” Dead Wife said slowly. “There’s a date I have to keep. Unfortunately, this shit went down before we could cross the state line.”

Pat whistled lowly. “Well, why don’t you come on through, I’m sure bossman will want to hear whatever the story is behind a New York taxi driver, an undead woman, and a—what are you?” 

“Leprechaun,” Sweeney said, and the kid took a step back, looking him up and down. Sweeney had a good five inches on him, not including the boots.

“Never would have guessed,” Pat said.

The “back office” turned out to be less an office, and more a warren of rooms full of auto parts, mysterious tools, engine blocks, and cars in various states of repair. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to any of it; there was a Model A up on cinder blocks next to a perfectly ordinary four-door, and Sweeney would have sworn he saw a small oil derrick spilling crude stuck in a corner. At one point, Dead Wife stopped to stare at a sleek red car with its hood popped open, a hungry longing plain on her face. (He’d only seen her look that way when she was talking about Shadow Moon and her perverse, fucked up wanting of him. Watching her, Sweeney wondered if she would call this love too.)

Dead Wife caught him looking, and her expression went blank, quick as a switch flipped. “I always wanted a red corvette,” she said, and then she was turning away, walking faster to catch up to Ibrahim.

Pat ushered Dead Wife, Ibrahim, and Sweeney out from the warren into a cavernous space, much bigger than any part of Wilbur’s Automotive had seemed from the outside. Sweeney supposed you could call it a garage, and there were certainly cars in it—but garages generally didn’t have an enormous black racetrack in them, stretching off into the distance.

There was a  _ forest _ , in this so-called garage. The black racetrack curved around it, disappearing behind a thicket of pines. And the air was warm, warmer than the world outside had been. It smelled like gasoline, and metal.

“Cool your heels here, and I’ll go get the boss,” Pat told them, walking off towards a thicket of trees.

Sweeney looked down and scuffed his shoe against the black surface of the track, wondering what it was made of. He could just about make out grooves, the sort you’d see between bricks, but there was no shine to them at all. The whole black expanse seemed to eat light—it made it hard to see anything else, the longer he stared.

“Look at that,” Ibrahim breathed, startling Sweeney out of his thoughts. When Sweeney glanced over at him, he was pointing up at the ceiling. Only—when Sweeney looked, he wasn't sure if you could call it that. Not when the track apparently looped  _ up  _ and circled back across a vaulted dome of sky. Clouds were drifting across it.

“Okay, that’s not something you see every day,” Dead Wife said.

It took a lot of power to warp the world like this, Sweeney knew. People built religions from the ground up, literally; they started with the gods of the earth, the world as it was, and went up from there. (The aes sídhe had been rooted in the earth, people of the mounds, before they were fairies of the Otherworld; even now, Sweeney lived in fear of Íŋyaŋ coming back to finish what he started.) To twist even a small part of that world into this...surrealist automotive nightmare, meant someone had the ability, the capability. That meant  _ power _ .

They were so engrossed in the black racetrack that all three of them startled when a man cleared his throat. 

He was handsome, or at least had been handsome once—the remnants of it were still there, a hazy outline beneath the jowls and the thickened middle, the glasses perched on his nose. Still, even in a jumpsuit identical to the one Pat wore, there was a dated air to him. It was the small moustache, really, the way his hair had been slicked back; even the tortoiseshell glasses he wore had been popular half a century ago.

“Wilbur Shaw, of Wilbur’s Auto,” the man said, shaking each of their hands in turn. “Pat was telling me you had some car trouble. I’ve sent Louis and Bill with the tow, we’ll get you back on the road in no time.”

“You’re dead too,” Sweeney said, not pretending to hide his surprise. Shaw was even shorter, and had to tilt his head back to meet Sweeney’s gaze; Sweeney was almost impressed when he didn’t look away.

Pat laughed. “I told you, bossman! He’s quick.”

Shaw smiled a broad, photo-finish sort of smile; it somehow made him look even more dead. A death mask rather than a dead man. “You are correct, Mister…?”

“Sweeney.”

“Well, you are correct, Mister Sweeney. But then, we are all dead men here.”

“What do you mean?” Dead Wife said. “And before you say anything, yeah, I know I’m dead. Hard to avoid that personal revelation. But it can’t be the same sort of dying. I mean, you look alive, really alive. He said he’s been dead almost sixty years, how is he not rotting?”

Wilbur Shaw looking at her now, and Sweeney only narrowly kept himself from stepping between them, shielding her from that stare. He was pretty sure that Laura Moon could handle herself—he still had bruises from their dust-up at the motel—but where the auto shop set him on edge, Wilbur Shaw made him downright uneasy. There was something in Shaw’s smile, the deliberate attitude of ease that reminded Sweeney of Grimnir; the air of a god at home in his kingdom, and aware of that power.

Shaw kept on smiling. “You know, I’d love to know what brings you folks like you to Misery. So let’s make a deal, shall we?” Shaw said. “You tell me your story, and I’ll tell you ours. ”

Sweeney went cold. ‘Deal’ was always a bad word, no matter who was on the other side of it, and Shaw was smiling—that death mask smile—right at Laura Moon. She was trying to stare him down, to meet his gaze without flinching.

“Why don’t you tell it, leprechaun?” Ibrahim blurted out. He looked startled when the attention of the group turned to him, but he swallowed and squared his shoulders. “He is the expert among us, he should be the one to tell the story.”

Shaw blinked, and turned to Sweeney. (Sweeney didn’t think he was imagining Laura Moon’s startled intake of breath, like someone startled awake.)

Sweeney swallowed, nodding. “Of course. A story for a story,” he said carefully. “Those are the terms.”

Shaw flashed that dazzling smile. “Exactly, a fair exchange. What you give is what you get in this life, don’t you agree?”

Sweeney clenched his jaw. “Well then, I’d best not lie to you, Wilbur Shaw.”

“A good instinct.”

Sweeney preferred lying, when he could; it was more convenient for one, and over the centuries he’d developed a knack for it. But he knew this game, he’d played it before enough times, and not lying was not the same as telling the truth. 

It wasn’t a long story, once Sweeney pared it down to the essentials. Boy meets girl, girl dies. (Her mouth was wrapped another boy’s cock at the time, and there was a leprechaun driving the car that crashed into them, but these details weren’t pertinent.) Boy accidentally buries girl with a magical coin, which revives her, at least in part. (It wasn’t important how the boy got the coin.) Girl hits the road in search of the boy, and by sheer coincidence meets up with a New York taxi driver and a leprechaun. (There was a lot of blood and fighting in between, it didn’t seem worth mentioning.)

Unfortunately, when girl tries to cross the Indiana state line, it all goes to hell.

“Ah, I see,” Shaw said, when the story was finished. Their little group had settled onto a flight of wooden steps beside the track—Sweeney could have sworn there hadn’t actually  _ been  _ a grandstand there before, but it was hard to deny something so solid. Ibrahim had taken up a spot close enough to Sweeney for their shoulders to brush; Dead Wife settled herself the other side, and a step above, bringing them to level height. Though Sweeney would go to his death before admitting it, there was something reassuring about being flanked by them, as though a Roman formation had sprung up around him with its shields out.

“I think I understand,” Shaw said, with a nod to Sweeney. “And we certainly can fix your taxi, that’s no trouble.”

“Seriously?” Dead Wife asked. “You understand? Because I have a hard time believing all this, and I was  _ there _ .”

Shaw sighed, settling back in his seat. He looked less threatening this way, more like a human and less like there was something dark lurking just below his skin.

“America wasn’t conceived as one land, you know. America at its heart is a confederation of countries, a map of affiliated but distinct nations. It’s in the name: the United States. And like all nations, states jealously guard what’s theirs—including the dead buried within their borders. They have an especially good claim if the dead in question died with Indiana iron in her blood, Indiana dust in her bones; if she breathed Indiana air, ate Indiana’s fruit and drank its water. The jurisdiction’s clear, you see. So when she comes to rest in Indiana soil, she’s just returning what was rightfully Indiana’s to begin with.

“Usually, the dead just aren’t in a position to complain about it,” Shaw finished.

“That seems…” Dead Wife huffed, and shook her head.

“I was born in Indiana, and I died here,” Pat piped up suddenly, and surprised flickered across Dead Wife’s face as she turned to face him. “We all did.”

Shaw smiled faintly at Pat, almost paternally. “Yes, I did promise our story in turn, didn’t I.” He cleared his throat, and there was something almost shy about the way he asked: “Tell me, Mrs. Moon, are you a fan of auto racing?”

Dead Wife blinked, clearly taken aback. “You mean like NASCAR? We got tickets to the Indy 500 once, that’s about the extent of—”

She broke off with a startled noise, and Sweeney didn’t blame her. 

Shaw was  _ beaming,  _ a smile that seemed to have entirely too many teeth for a human mouth. “That is exactly what I mean, Mrs. Moon: the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race. Would you say that Indiana is richer, for having it?”

“I—I know it brings in money, tourist dollars,” Dead Wife said faintly. She was still staring at Shaw’s mouth.

“I don’t mean riches in the strictly financial sense. I mean, the state of Indiana is known for it,” Shaw said. “For a state, to be  _ known  _ is to have power. Countries and nations...they’re only lines on a map, Mrs. Moon, unless stories are told about them. Unless they’re given a meaning. And when a man comes along, and creates a story that gets a state  _ talked  _ about, that gets it recognized, that brings hundreds of thousand of people swarming to it year after year...well. That state sits up and takes notice.”

“So what does the state do?” a man’s voice called out. 

They all turned to see two mechanics—presumably, Louis and Bill—walking towards them across the track. The two stopped at the base of the bleachers, and the older man with the rounded face grinned. 

“Well? Come on, bossman, what does the state of Indiana do for that favored son, who brought such riches into being?”

Shaw shook his head, chuckling lightly. “Are you boys done already?”

“Eh, she only needed a stern talking-to and an oil change. Nothing we could do about the smell, though. I’m Bill, by the way, and this is Louis,” the rounder mechanic added, gesturing to the smaller, darker man beside him.

Ibrahim asked some question about the transmission, but Sweeney was busy tracing the line of the black racetrack, the way it looped off into fog and then somehow returned, following the curve of the sky above them. The sky was cloudier now, some of the color leached away as the sun dipped down towards the horizon.  _ What does the state of Indiana do for that favored son _ , Sweeney wondered idly.  _ A son who loved cars and wanted to race right up into the sky _ —

“Did you invent this Indy race?” Sweeney asked, squinting up a the black trackway. “Is that what all this is?”

That would make Wilbur Shaw powerful, Sweeney thought. Maybe even a god. Every lap around the track would be a prayer, an offering to him. Every crash would be proof of his pitiless strength, every victory won in his merciful name. People would flock to his altar to pour out libations, screaming for his champions. Gods who ruled arenas were always powerful—and they never lacked for worshippers, even when holy sites stood empty.

When no answer came, Sweeney looked back down at Shaw. 

“I didn’t invent it,” Shaw finally said. Behind his glasses, his eyes seemed darker than before, almost black. “But I won three times, and helped remake it for a new age.”

“Are you a god, then?” Ibrahim asked.

The darkness behind Shaw’s eyes vanished, the photo-finish smile flickering back into being. “No. Gods are...you’ll know, when you’re face to face with a god. I’ve always considered myself something like a saint. I served a god, and then I was rewarded with an afterlife.”

Beside Sweeney, Dead Wife shifted uneasily. When he glanced over at her, her expression was blank, impossible to read. He wondered if discussion of religion really could make her that uncomfortable—her, a dead girl, traveling with a leprechaun and a jinn’s lover on a pilgrimage to resurrection.  (Then again, the sheer irony of Laura Moon’s existence was choking. Being an atheist human sacrifice for a war between gods was just the cherry on a shit sundae.)

Dead Wife cleared her throat and asked: “What about the rest of you? Are you saints too?”

“More like offerings,” the darker driver, Louis, said. He wasn’t smiling at all. “Blood sacrifices.”

“We died in racing accidents,” Pat said with a reproving look at Louis. “That’s all he means, ma’am. Some of died in the Brickyard, some of us in other races scattered throughout the state...all of Indiana’s dead racers come through here, and get a choice to stay or move on. So yeah, maybe blood sacrifices, maybe that’s it. But for our sacrifice, we were rewarded with eternal life.”

“Eternal life in Indiana,” Sweeney said dryly. “That doesn’t sound like much of a reward.”

Louis snorted. “It is, when the alternative is dying in Indiana,” he said.

Dead Wife was watching this back and forth with a growing hunger—that same look again, the Shadow-Moon-and-a-red-corvette look. (The memory rose, unbidden: Laura cross-legged at the side of the road, saying,  _ life is great _ . She’d been looking at the sky that way, like she wanted to swallow it whole, and spit out the bones after.)

“So is there—I don’t know, a god of Indiana?” Dead Wife asked. “Maybe I can talk to them, maybe there’s some sort of appeals process...”

The mechanics exchanged a glance.

“I admit, Mrs. Moon, I don’t know,” Shaw finally said. “None of us have tried to find an alternative. Most folks who come through here, they think of it as a gift. Indiana is their home, they don’t feel a need to leave.”

There was a note of disapproval in his voice that Sweeney didn’t like. He’d heard cult leaders talk like that about their mad gods, who always disapproved of the same things they themselves did. (Sweeney had met one or two of them, in his time—the gods of cults, created by a sudden, fervid burst of terrible belief. They always made him think of junkies, dangerously erratic and chasing that next high.) 

Dead Wife sat back, her expression going shuttered and blank again. “I see.”

Suddenly, Louis cleared his throat. “There’s a...a place, in Indianapolis,” he said. “Not too far from the track, actually. Sort of a waystation for folks like us.”

“I thought I told you boys not to go there,” Shaw interrupted, and Louis rolled his eyes. Sweeney got the sense there was a history there, but he wasn’t interested.

“What is this ‘waystation’ of yours?” Sweeney asked.

“It’s called the House of Blue Lights. Most everyone who’s anyone in Indiana has come or gone through at some point. If there is a god out there who can hear your case, someone there would probably know,” Louis said. “It’s a bit harder to find these days, it had to go underground. But you can use my name to get in.”

“It’s not a nice place,” Shaw said, as though they weren’t standing in a malevolent garage on the crumbling side of Misery, Indiana, where dead mechanics had too many teeth. “Especially not for a lady.”

“Lucky, then, we don’t have any of those travelling with us,” Laura Moon said, and smiled like she also had too many teeth, and was perfectly willing to bury them in his throat.

It wasn’t particularly funny, as retorts went, but Sweeney laughed anyway. Dead Wife looked startled by it, her gaze flying to him, and the toothy smile faltered into something that looked—almost sincere. Dangerously close to sincere. Sweeney didn’t think she even realized she was doing it. 

Then she seemed to come back to herself, and looked away. 

“Well, thanks for helping with the taxi, fellas,” Dead Wife said, getting to her feet. She started down the bleachers, walking along the tops of the metal seats and pointedly ignoring Bill’s horrified look. “Love to stay and chat, but apparently there’s a bar in Indy calling our name.”

Ibrahim and Sweeney rose to follow her when Shaw interrupted. 

“There is,” he said, his expression thoughtful, “the small matter of payment, Mrs. Moon.”

Dead Wife froze. Very slowly, she turned back, and regarded Shaw with hooded eyes. “Not sure I can help you with that,” she said. “The leprechaun’s the one with all the gold.”

Shaw chuckled. “I have more than enough prize money, decades of winnings. Gold’s just a shiny metal, compared to that.”

The muscle in her jaw ticked. “Okay then, Speed Racer. What do you want? My firstborn child?”

“No, of course not,” Shaw scoffed. “You don’t plan on having children, sacrificing a child you won’t have isn’t any price to pay. I need something precious from you, Mrs. Moon; something that you’ll  _ miss _ .”

If there had been any blood left Laura Moon’s body, Sweeney strong suspected it would have drained from her face. Instead, she reared back, fury twisting her features. “What,” she spat, “the  _ fuck _ . How do you know that shit about me? Who the fuck are you?”

“There’s no need to be rude, Mrs. Moon.”

“It is my taxi,” Ibrahim said suddenly, taking the bleacher steps almost quickly enough to stumble. He came stand beside Laura, curled his hands into fists. “If there is a fee, surely I—”

“This doesn’t concern you.” 

“It is my taxi!”

Pat took Ibrahim’s shoulder, clearly trying to guide him away; Sweeney felt a strange sort of pride when Ibrahim shoved the mechanic instead, snarling to keep his hands off. Pat only stumbled a few steps, and when he turned to face them again, he smiled ruefully at Ibrahim, putting his hands out. “Leave this to the dead, son. This is our business.”

“It is  _ not _ —” Ibrahim began, but Shaw interrupted.

“It has to be you,” Shaw told Dead Wife, who shivered. “You’re the one who wants my help to steal from Indiana, to betray my god. Fair’s fair, Mrs. Moon.”

Her mouth thinned to a razor-wound. “I wasn’t exactly buried with the family jewels.”

“I told you, I don’t need money. Something important to you. Something worth having, and worth giving away. A gift from a dead woman.”

“So...what, a finger? My soul? My library card? Give me some—”

She went quiet suddenly, and her eyes found Sweeney. For a long, long moment, Dead Wife looked up at him, her expression inscrutable. “Truth,” she finally said, like she was testing it out. Her gaze was still locked with Sweeney’s. “What if I offered you a secret?”

Sweeney sucked in a sharp breath. Laura Moon didn’t seem like the type to have read fairy tales, but that was some genuine old school shit. When it came to deals, secrets were up there with favors, the color of your eyes, your true name or a firstborn child. Of course truth was dangerous to give away, but so was everything else; at least the truth might let them leave with all their limbs intact. 

Sweeney gave her a small nod.

Laura dropped her gaze back to Shaw. “I’ll tell you a secret, something true. If you know shit about me, you know how rare that is. That has to be enough to cover the bill.”

There was a pause—Sweeney’s heart beat hard and fast against his breastbone—and then Shaw nodded. “Done.”

Triumph flashed across Laura Moon’s face. She crossed back to the grandstand, climbing up to the stand on the step in front of Shaw. Her chin thrust out, and Sweeney saw Laura smile, a taut, lipless grimace. “You have a particular preference, or will any secret do?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

“Great,” she muttered, and then she was leaning in, whispering in Shaw’s ear. A beat, two, and she straightened up again. 

“Happy?” she asked, crossing her arms over her stomach.

“I will consider the payment fulfilled.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic. We’re leaving now.”

She stormed back across the track, heading for the back office; Sweeney didn’t even try to look apologetic when she pulled over a rack of tires as she went. The tires scattered everywhere, some of them rolling onto the grass and away into the trees. Pat made a hurt noise, but Louis actually chuckled, almost approving.

“She’s a peach, really,” Sweeney said with a razor-blade smirk at Shaw.

Shaw’s expression didn’t change, still that pleasant, photo-finish smile. Sweeney swallowed.

“We should go,” Ibrahim said, meeting Sweeney’s gaze meaningfully. “We have spent enough time here.”

“Agreed,” Sweeney muttered, and took the bleachers two at a time..

Ibrahim was out of breath and Sweeney was pissed as hell when they caught up with her, somewhere in the warren of the back office. She didn’t seem to be flagging at all, stomping along the makeshift path between stacks of gears and cars up on cinder blocks. (Sweeney got the sense she’d gladly toss a match and watch it burn, but then, he’d already seen what she did to the red corvette.)

“Slow  _ down,  _ you madwoman,” Sweeney said as he came up alongside her. “What did you even tell him?

“Nothing. Let’s get the fuck out of this place.”

The red corvette had been smoking faintly; Sweeney decided not to push the matter further. The three of them walked the rest of the way—filing back through the ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’ door, and then on through the grey waiting room—in silence.

At the sight of the taxi gleaming in the low light of afternoon, Ibrahim made a noise that was sheer relief and rushed out to it, already exclaiming over the new coat of paint. “The light is fixed!” he called back. “And the engine is not making that noise!”

“Great,” Dead Wife said distractedly. She wasn’t looking anymore, but neither was Sweeney.

Sweeney and Dead Wife had frozen there on the front step, staring at the row of mechanics—lined up by the door in identical uniforms, like a receiving line. Shaw was smiling that photo-finish, race-winning death mask of a smile; Pat waved. Only Louis looked anything like Sweeney might have expected, his head bowed as he scuffed his boot against the gravel.

“Mister Sweeney. Mrs. Moon,” Shaw said cheerfully. “Thank you for your business.”

Dead Wife tried to back away, and Sweeney moved by instinct, putting a hand between her shoulder blades to stop her from crashing into him. She froze, but he could feel her trembling under his hand. (That was stranger than all the rest, knowing that Laura Moon could tremble.) 

“Go to the taxi,” Sweeney said lowly. “Go.”

She nodded, never taking her eyes off Shaw. “Yeah, okay,” she murmured. One step, then another, and then she was darting across the yard. Sweeney heard a door slam, and only then did he let out a ragged breath.

“Mister Sweeney, a word?” Shaw said, and Sweeney could have punched him in the teeth for that mild, polite tone. The goddamn smile.

“A  _ word  _ is more than you are owed,” Sweeney said, his voice barely above a growl. “She may be an arrogant bitch and he may be a useless son of one, but I don’t let anyone fuck with me and mine. You tell your god to lay off; Indiana is not so fucking special that I can’t burn it down.”

Shaw studied at Sweeney, his pleasant expression never faltering. “I know there’s a war coming, Mister Sweeney. A good auto race driver must be like a weathercock: able to tell when a storm might threaten his run. But I lived through one such war, and didn’t enjoy it much—it slowed us down, you see. Gave us speed limits and turned us into men who made tires instead of racing on them.”

“Good for fucking you. What’s your point?”

Wilbur Shaw smiled that photo-finish smile, and then—suddenly enough that Sweeney took a step back, biting down on a curse—Wilbur Shaw was a corpse in a blue jumpsuit. 

Shaw’s body looked like it had been broken in every place there was something to break, covered in bruising, spilling blood. Beside him, Pat’s head lolled at an angle no living man’s neck could, and blackened burns moved across his skin like a stormfront; Louis’ left arm shriveled until it was a crushed, dead stump, and the healthy glow went out of him like a popped lightbulb. 

Bill looked worse, Sweeney thought, like a corpse dredged up from a river and set to molder.

“We are simple men, Mister Sweeney,” Shaw said, spreading his broken, bloody hands. “Being dead clarifies things. All we want is to be left alone with the track and the sky, and occasionally do a good turn for our neighbors in this great state. Please tell Mister Fráríðr that, when you see him in Wisconsin. We are not for him, we are not against him—but if he wants to ride into battle, other hands will have to make his wagon.

“Do you understand?”

Sweeney swallowed. Shaw’s eyes were milky, unseeing; the effect was more unsettling than that dark gaze had been. “I understand.”

“Thank you. So long, Mister Sweeney,” Shaw said, and one by one the dead men of Wilbur’s Automotive turned away, and shuffled back into the white building. The door swung shut behind them, and then the gravel yard was quiet.

Sweeney exhaled, counting to ten, and then back to nothing again.

He walked slowly back to the taxi after, numb. Both Dead Wife and Ibrahim looked up when he opened the rear door, and slid into the backseat. The tension was thick in the air; Ibrahim’s knuckles were white where he clutched the wheel, and Dead Wife had her mouth pressed in a thin, razor-wound line. “Sweeney—?” Dead Wife asked, but he shook his head.

“Drive,” Sweeney said hoarsely.

He didn’t have to repeat himself. 

  
  
  
  
  



	3. THE HOUSE OF BLUE LIGHTS

  
  


“What did you tell him?” Sweeney asked. Ibrahim was praying again, there on the shoulder of the road, and Sweeney had taken the opportunity to stretch his legs. Dead Wife had joined him after a minute or so, leaning against the taxi and lighting up a cigarette. She hadn’t said anything, seemingly content to watch the cars go by and pretend she didn’t notice him less than a foot away.

He wondered where she kept getting all those cigarettes.

“Well?” Sweeney prompted when she didn’t answer. “Come on, we’re all dying to know what secret of Laura Moon’s is enough for a man to betray his god.”

She exhaled a mouthful of smoke. Dusk was kind to her; it made her look almost mythic, less like a dead girl and more a goddess, breathing fire. “What’ll you give me in return?” she asked finally.

“I beg your pardon?”

The corner of her mouth quirked. “Wilbur Shaw, the patron saint of the Indy 500, gave me a taxi—and knowledge, or at least directions to the next stop on this insane quest. If I tell you that same secret, what will you give?”

Sweeney was almost impressed. “Gold. More gold that you can imagine.”

“Pass. You’ve got shitloads of gold, and none of it equal to the coin I’ve got. Wilbur’s an asshole, but he had that much right—it doesn’t count if it doesn’t hurt.”

Sweeney snorted. “I’m reminded of a certain very quaint sexual metaphor...”

She hummed, and took another drag on the cigarette. “True. But you realize that particular metaphor doesn’t work when it’s me fucking with you, right? After all, you’ve got that same button Salim does. By that logic, you _like_ it.”

In the dusk, her eyes were perfectly colorless, like glass. Sweeney couldn’t see anything behind them, except maybe smoke.

 

//

 

His country—Sweeney’s country, when he was still Suibhne mac Colmain and king of it—had roads. Trackways really, toghers made up of not much more than hurdles laid end-to-end across the bog; impassable in winter and haunted by spirits and sprites and all else in summer. There hadn’t been a west or an east, in those days, and no maps to find them with. The roads followed the land towards the sea, and stopped where the cliffs met the water.

People got lost following the trackways, of course, but there were a lot more reasons for such things in those days: monsters, gods, fairies, ghosts. Not like the modern world, where men were counted and accounted for, and so when someone dropped off the edges of the map, it was because explicable forces made it so. (Death in a hundred forms is still only death, at the end of the story.) It had been a simpler time, when Sweeney was a king. Bloody and brutish, ugly, full gods that couldn’t be appeased, but...simpler. No one had needed maps when you could scrawl ‘here be dragons’ over most everything.

Sweeney was fairly certain there were no dragons in Indianapolis, but the woods around them was dark enough that he wouldn’t have known, if there were.

“I think,” Ibrahim said, squinting down at the park map, or at least as much of it as could be made out by the weak light of the flashlight, “that we should head west.”

“And west is…?” Dead Wife asked, gesturing to the vast expanse of trees surrounding them, little more than shadows among shadows. Something in the darkness croaked, while another something screamed out a high, animal cry. Neither filled Sweeney with confidence.

Dead Wife sighed. “Come on, Salim-not-Salim. Admit it: we’re lost.”

“We are not lost!”

“We are fucking _lost,_ “ Sweeney said. “We are wandering around the woods, in the dark, with a goddamn keychain flashlight and a map that looks like a dribbling idiot drew it. Even better, it doesn’t have our destination actually fucking marked, which begs the question why we’re consulting the thing at all.”

“I am not the one who needs to find the House of Blue Lights,” Ibrahim said, thrusting the map out to Sweeney. It was flimsy, black-and-white lines on printer paper—apparently the Indianapolis park district couldn’t be bothered to invest in anything more durable. “You are welcome to try something else, if you’d prefer.”

“I’d _prefer_ we didn’t stop eight fucking thousand times for you to pray. Then, we might have got here before dark, and could have actually found our way around.”

Ibrahim’s expression darkened. “You are—”

“Shut up, both of you,” Dead Wife interrupted. The glowing tip of her cigarette cast strange, ugly shadows on her face. “Okay? Enough. Let’s get just get out of here. We’ll find a place to crash and a come back in the morning. Try once there’s actually light to see by.”

“Agreed,” Sweeney said, holding out a hand. Dead Wife rolled her eyes and passed the cigarette over to him.

(It was foul, barely anything more than black tar through a filter. Sweeney had never liked Virginia Slims, but he enjoyed making Laura Moon share, when every fiber of her being so clearly wanted to punch him in the teeth for asking it of her. Laura Moon, Sweeney suspected, had never shared anything in her life, and was not about to start now that that life was over.)

“I think that is a mistake,” Ibrahim said as Sweeney took another drag. “We are not lost, we still can find our way—”

Sweeney and Dead Wife exchanged a look over Ibrahim’s head. Without a word, they turned and set off back towards the parking lot.

Dead Wife was pale enough that, in the dark and out of the corner of his eye, she looked more like a ghost than a dead girl. It was a strange thought—even dead, Dead Wife was too real, too _there_ ; it was impossible to think of her as anything less than a body, an immovable object. Even if that body was smelling of decay and silvery-pale in the dark.

“You are not supposed to smoke in the park,” Ibrahim said sullenly, coming up behind them as Sweeney passed the cigarette back to Dead Wife. “It says so on the map, it is a fire hazard.”

Sweeney caught Dead Wife’s eye. She looked faintly amused, her eyes red in the light of the cigarette. “Well, think of it this way, Salim: if I accidently set fire to the forest, it’ll be a lot easier to find the House of Blue Lights.”

Sweeney laughed, and Dead Wife’s smile faltered towards genuine again, that accidental slip into sincerity. This time, Sweeney didn’t look away, watching as she blinked and caught her breath, schooling her face into blankness.

Sweeney still found it strange, that little quirk. Shadow Moon had seemed like the sort of man who committed to laughing at his wife’s jokes; the devoted sort always tried. It made Sweeney wonder if Laura Moon hadn’t told them, if she’d actually tried to be a _wife_ , which meant no cracks about arson. It would account for the surprise, and the tentative, almost unthinking way she smiled when someone thought her being an asshole was funny.

Sweeney wondered if she’d been dead, long before he got to her.

Dead Wife made a soft noise, and bent down. When she had straightened up again, there was a gold coin between her fingers. “Yours, I believe,” she said, offering it up to Sweeney. Even in the weak moonlight, it gleamed like day.

At the outset they’d agreed—or Dead Wife and Ibrahim had agreed, and then ignored Sweeney’s protests to the contrary—on pieces of gold to mark their way. Like breadcrumbs, except extremely valuable and therefore deeply stupid to leave scattered throughout the woods. Still, Sweeney had to admit that the coins made for good flares: even the weak keychain flashlight couldn’t ignore them. They were too bright, too much like sunlight in the depthless night.

“You’re not tempted to keep it?” Sweeney asked. “I’ll let you, in trade for the secret you gave Wilbur Shaw.”

Dead Wife snorted. “Pass,” she said, flipping the coin to him. Sweeney caught it out of the air, tucking it away with the others and pretending not to notice the way Dead Wife’s eyes followed his hands as he did so. (If pressed, he couldn’t say where his gold came from or went back to, only that it was elsewhere—the Otherworld, maybe, where Bran sailed forever and the dead came to rest in Donn’s house. Or maybe there was a hole in the ground in Virginia stuffed full of coins bearing the sun’s stamp. It was faith, the mechanics weren’t important.)

“What is that?” Ibrahim asked suddenly.

Sweeney glanced back, only to find that Ibrahim had stopped dead a few feet behind them. He was pointing to the trail, the weak beam of the flashlight focused on something on ahead. Sweeney rolled his eyes and turned back to see—

“Okay, what the fuck,” Dead Wife said, after a moment of stunned silence.

They had all been standing there, and staring. Sweeney glanced at Dead Wife, but she hadn’t taken her eyes off the trail.

“Is it a...dog?” Ibrahim ventured slowly. “It looks like a dog.”

It did look like a dog—a monster of a dog, large enough that its head nearly came to Sweeney’s hip. It had thick fur and a heavy head, heavy jowls, a coat that alternated patches of dark and light. The thing that was probably a dog acted like it as well, whining at the sight of them and wagging its tail.

Except the thing that was probably a dog was also insubstantial as mist, and glowing bright blue.

“Is Cujo a thing?” Dead Wife asked suddenly. “If Cujo is real, you have to tell me. I hated that movie.”

“I don’t know what a Cujo is,” Sweeney said. The dog didn’t seem like a god, but Sweeney hadn’t recognized Coyote the first time they met either. He’d learned not to underestimate gods who walked on all fours. (Sweeney still had the scars of that fight, bite marks up his leg that he didn’t think would ever leave him.) The other alternative was a ghost, but it was unusual to see a ghost of an animal without a human somewhere around to will it into being.

“I’ll tell you what I do know, though,” Sweeney said. A bright flare of gold had caught his eye—clutched in the glowing dog’s jaws, the only substantial thing about the whole picture. “That fucking mutt has one of my coins.”

“What do we do, then?” Dead Wife asked. “Throw it a glowing blue stick? Pray to the god of glowing blue dogs?”

“It’s blue,” Ibrahim said suddenly, as though this was a revelation and not stating the blindingly obvious.

“Well spotted.”

Behind him, Sweeney could hear Ibrahim sigh. “We are looking for the House of Blue Lights,” Ibrahim said slowly, as though he were speaking to particularly stupid small children. "And now there is a dog, glowing with a bright blue light and sitting in our path with your coin in its jaws. Are we pretending these things are not related? Perhaps it is meant to be our guide.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we follow a glowing dog through the dark forest to an unknown location?” Sweeney asked incredulously. “Following mysterious lights into the dark has never ended well, not when it was Jack o’ the Lantern and not when it was little green men doing anal probes.”

Sweeney could feel Ibrahim glaring at the back of his head. “I think it is too great a coincidence to ignore. What do we have to lose?”

“Our _lives_ , Ibrahim bin Irem.”

“You know that is not my name!”

Laura Moon sighed loudly, enough that Sweeney turned to look at her. “I’m really not a dog person, just so you know,” she announced, dropping her cigarette and grinding it out beneath her toe.

“What does that have to do with—”

Sweeney swore and tried to grab her as she stepped forward, but she ducked his hand and darted forward onto the trail, towards the mysterious glowing dog. With a labored exhale, she took another step, then another. Slowly, she walked toward the dog, her hands outstretched.

“Hey there,” Dead Wife crooned. “Hey there, sweetheart. I’m not going to hurt you, all right? Just...stay very still.”

The dog didn’t move, just looked up at her and whined, its tail thumping against and then through the dirt.

She was only an arm’s length away when she stopped, and slowly, so slowly, lowered herself to a crouch. They were almost of a height like that, the huge, ghostly outline of a dog and Laura Moon, almost kneeling there on the dirt. Without ever letting up the stream of comforting nonsense, she reached out—Sweeney heard the sudden, sharp intake of breath when her hand went through the dog’s head, and she almost flinched.

It didn’t seem to mind, whuffing happily and nosing at Laura like its nose didn’t go straight through her arm, each time.

Carefully, Laura pried the gold coin from its mouth. It flashed, weakly in the light from the flashlight, and then it was gone. Somewhere in her pockets, Sweeney suspected, unless she had an elsewhere too. (It’d explain where the cigarettes came from.) “Good boy,” Laura Moon breathed, not-quite-petting the blue dog. “Such a good boy. Thank you for our coin. Now, can you take us to the House of Blue Lights?”

The dog cocked its head and made a low noise, a deep and growling bark. Then it turned and trotted off into the trees.

Dead Wife straightened up, whisking the dirt from her jeans.

“Well, let’s go. Cross your fingers for aliens, since everybody here likes anal.”

Her grin was a sharp, bright sickle, and then she was gone, haring off into the trees the after the dog. Ibrahim shouted for her to wait and raced after her in turn, the light of the flashlight bobbing in the dark.

Sweeney, for his part, stayed exactly where he was.

After a moment, he tipped his head back and sighed loudly at the sky. The stars were out only weakly—Indianapolis was still a city, there was too much artificial light, too close—but Sweeney still imagined he could pick out the plow, the crown. The old signs.

“This is what I get, isn’t it?” he asked them. “Claim a couple humans in the sight of a dead man, suddenly you have to put up with all their bullshit. Lose half a dozen gold pieces and your fucking dignity in the process.”

Nothing answered, but then, Sweeney hadn’t really expected anything to. With another sigh, he lowered his head again and followed his humans into the woods.

They followed the glowing blue dog for at least a mile—ten miles, if Sweeney ever recounted this story for an audience, since that was what it felt like. There were too many culvers and gullies, downed trees, bushes, all of them lying in wait in the dark. The dog only stopped or slowed when they were lagging behind. “I can’t believe I’m getting shit from the ghost of a dog,” Laura muttered the third time, when the mutt actually seemed to turn and _glare_ at them. Sweeney laughed, but it was too dark to see Dead Wife’s expression, if she was smiling. It was too dark to see much of anything that wasn’t the fucking dog.

They kept walking.

Sweeney hadn’t thought the park was this deep. The map had made it look like a few dozen acres, barely a few hours’ journey end to end. But then, Sweeney didn’t remember the trees looking like this either. They’d gone from skinny cedars and sparse boxwoods to maple trees, hickory and oak, thick around the middle; the kind of tree that had never seen an axe or saw, that didn’t know the meaning of those words. If Indiana had ever had forests like this, it was lifetimes ago. Long before anyone ever called it by that name.

When Sweeney first came to America, it had been this way. Endless forests, except for those small places men had cleared and carved out for themselves—and even then the wood lingered at the horizon, at the edges of sight. Sweeney had met Okeus there, once and long ago; he’d felt very young under the gaze of such a god, who had lived among the trees and on the land for much longer than Sweeney had even known either existed. _I will endure,_ Okeus had said, even as they watched men file into the wooden church, and speak their English prayers. _As long as there are real men among the trees, this land is mine._

Sweeney couldn’t help thinking about that now—and about toghers, about Jack o’ the Lantern.

“So, just curious,” Sweeney said, helping Ibrahim to his feet again. Ibrahim was panting, and his forearms were wet—Sweeney suspected that he’d slipped in mud. “When can we agree that See Spot Run here is leading us to our deaths?”

“We have been walking a long ways,” Ibrahim admitted. The keychain flashlight was wavering dangerously over his face, casting shadows. “And I lost the map.”

“It can’t be much farther,” Dead Wife said, but she didn’t sound at all certain. “We can turn back—what’s it doing?.”

The ghost dog had stopped, and its whole body was poised, trembling like a hunting dog that had found its quarry. After a moment, it opened its massive jaws and barked—once, twice, deep and rumbling noises that seemed to resonate up through the earth and into the air. It shivered the world.

And then, like a magic trick, a coin rolling over knuckles and down into the magician’s sleeve, the forest parted. It opened up, and they were standing at the edge of a clearing,

It was the windows, Sweeney decided. The walls were unremarkable whitewash, but you barely noticed. Not when there were all those windows,  themselves and brightness pouring from every one. Even the turret sparkled, shadowy figures moving behind its glass walls but dimming the light not at all. It all gave the impression of a jewel-box, cut glass refracting the light.

And the light—all of it, from the glittering tower to the naked bulb over the front door—was blue. It suffused the hillside with a strange glow, made everything unreal. Even in his own body, Sweeney felt unreal, stumbling from the dark into that strange blaze of color. (Indigo from the West Indies, mercury for Vegas’ neon signs; blue states, blue law, blue stars...blue was the color of truth, and America loved that shit, Sweeney thought dizzily. ‘Truth’ was up there with ‘West’ when it came to blind worship.)

Sweeney exhaled, closing his eyes and and opening them again. The House of Blue Lights still gleamed, windows like mirrors, and very very blue.

“Well, shit,” Dead Wife breathed.

“I agree,” Ibrahim said. He was clutching the keychain flashlight, but he seemed to have forgotten about it—the house was so bright, after all. He took a step forward, then glanced back at them. “Are we…?” he asked with an awkward gesture towards the house.

“No signs of little green men yet,” Sweeney said. “Might as well.”

The ghost dog had flopped down onto the grass and was panting, seemingly content to remain there. Dead Wife gave it absent-minded pat as they went by. “Good puppy,” she said, her fingers briefly disappearing into its hazy outline of its fur.

The house was solid, even if the dog wasn’t; Sweeney could press the flat of his hand to to the door, feel grain of the wood beneath his palm. He could knock, which he did; it swung open, letting out a gust of warm air and a rush of jazz music, voices, even more blue light spilling out over the threshold. Squinting into the welling brightness, Sweeney gave Louis’ name—“We’re looking for a god, or something close-to,” Sweeney added. They were ushered through.

The door shut behind them, and the the forest—still too deep, too ancient for a park in Indianapolis—was silent once again.

Only the ghostly dog was there to witness when the house shuddered, and then neatly folded itself up, sliding into a space too small to see. In its absence, the dog whined, putting its head down on its paws—but eventually, the dog faded away too, melting into the dark grass and the dead leaves. All was silent. The only sign anyone had been there at all was a keychain flashlight, carelessly abandoned in the long grass.

 

//

 

It was humans who’d invented the word ‘pantheon,’ Sweeney knew, because gods never could have. Gods didn’t generally think of themselves in the plural, didn’t consider their existence as anything like part of a set. They so rarely played well with others, busy with fighting or fucking, jockeying for a spot on the hierarchy of faith. Helping Grimnir recruit for his war had given Sweeney the impression that gods just didn’t _like_ each other very much—wary isolationism was considered a perfectly adequate, if not preferable, state of affairs.

(Personally, Sweeney preferred ‘murder’ to ‘pantheon.’ A murder of gods, like a murder of crows. It was more accurate too, since as far as Sweeney knew, crows hadn’t killed anyone.)

Even things that weren’t gods tended to be solitary. America liked its Lone Rangers and John the Conquerers, filled its forests with _the_ Bigfoot, a singular Jersey Devil. There were exceptions, of course: he knew the fairy court settled in Connecticut around the turn of the century, and Sweeney had spent several enjoyable evenings at a club in California run by a host of apsaras. But these were the exception—the rule was that Sweeney went his way alone, and sometimes crossed paths with other creatures, also alone. They’d part ways again shortly after.

It was, apparently, a rule that hadn’t made its way to Indiana yet.

“Is everyone here a god?” Dead Wife asked. She was very close to Sweeney, close enough for her shoulder to brush up against his arm. Her mouth was pressed in a tight, unhappy line, and Sweeney wondered if this was what Laura Moon looked like when she was afraid.

“Don’t think so,” Sweeney said. “You’d be able to feel them in the room, it’s like...static electricity, whenever gods get together. This is just a lot of whatever you want to call me, or Wilbur Shaw. Not-gods. Still dangerous, though.”

There were just—a _lot_ of them. And unlike the fairy court or the asuras, they didn’t seem to be all the same thing, or even from the same branches of faith. Sweeney, Dead Wife and Ibrahim had only gotten as far as the front room, and Sweeney had clocked at least four ghosts, a couple animal-human crosses, and a handful of otherwise ordinary-looking persons who very likely weren’t. (Ordinary, or persons.) They didn’t seem to even be from the same historical period: in the hall, a man with a traditional Native look had been talking to a stout woman wearing the long skirts Sweeney remembered from the turn of the century.

She’d been dripping blood, and he had rabbit ears, but Sweeney had taken that in stride.

Even the front room itself was odd, decorated like America had just celebrated V-day and teal modernist armchairs were still fashionable. Or maybe they weren’t teal, it was hard to tell what color anything was in the wash of blue light. Whatever their color, it carried the general atmosphere of a dated hotel lobby—not helped by a gramophone sitting in the corner, playing old-fashioned jazz. (Swing, Sweeney guessed, though he’d stopped paying close attention to popular music after he punched out Chauncey Olcott.) There was a ghostly couple dressed in medical smocks, standing over it and having an animated discussion Sweeney couldn’t overhear.

“This place is bizarre,” he murmured, and Dead Wife shot him a look.

“ _This_ place? Not the mechanics from hell, or the glowing blue St. Bernard, or the city park that goes on forever? This is where you draw the line?”

Sweeney shrugged, more to annoy her than anything. Dead Wife shot him an unimpressed look. “Fine. What’s our next move? Just...start asking people if there’s a god around?”

“I spoke to a ghost,” Ibrahim said suddenly, and Sweeney and Dead Wife both startled, turning to look at him with what Sweeney imagined was identical looks of surprise. Ibrahim only shrugged. “You were busy whispering to each other and staring, I did not feel like interrupting you. She is a librarian—or was a librarian, I am not sure which is appropriate in the case of someone dead. Tonight is her night off.”

Ibrahim straightened up suddenly, and lifted a hand in a friendly gesture. Across the room, a ghostly woman bathed in a grey light smiled and tipped her head to him, before returning to her conversation.

“What...did she say?” Dead Wife asked, sounding as bemused as Sweeney felt.

“She did not know of any god of Indiana,” Ibrahim said, lowering his hand. “But she said if any such thing had come here, the bartender would know. Or the host, but she said he is unreliable.”

“The host?” Sweeney asked.

Ibrahim shot him a quizzical look. “Of course. It is the _House_ of Blue Lights, why call it that unless someone lives here?”

Sweeney wondered what sort of creature could live in a place like this, let alone what would make that thing ‘unreliable.’ He certainly didn’t fancy meeting whatever-it-was in this seemingly endless sea of blue and muffled jazz.

“I guess we’ll start with the bartender, then,” Dead Wife said, catching Sweeney’s eye. He nodded, and Dead Wife turned back to Ibrahim. “Did your friend say where the bar was?”

“She did,” Ibrahim said doubtfully, “but she also said that the House...rearranges itself. ‘In this place, things are rarely where they were last,’ that is what she said.”

“Of course this is the haunted fucking mansion.” Sweeney sighed. “We’ll try wherever it was before, and if it’s not there, wander around like idiots until we actually do find it. Where did she say it was?”

“Miss Dickinson offered to show me where it was. That is her name, the ghost,” Ibrahim clarified at their blank looks. “But she, ah,” for the first time, Ibrahim looked awkward, and rubbed the back of his neck. “She said she will not show Laura.”

“She what?” Dead Wife demanded. “What the hell does she have against me?”

“It is nothing personal. She thinks the dead are...disturbing.”

“Disturbing? _She’s_ dead! She’s more dead than I am! She’s a ghost!”

Ibrahim spread his hands helplessly.

Dead Wife exhaled, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Okay, fine, whatever. New plan, then: Salim goes with Miss Hypocrite, Sweeney and I go searching for the bar in case it’s changed locations. Either way, we meet up at the bar. I wish I could still get drunk,” she muttered under her breath, narrowing her eyes at the grey lady.

“Well, I _can_ get drunk, so it sounds like a plan to me,” Sweeney said. “Shall we put our hands in, say ‘go team’ on three?”

That plan was met by resounding silence and a disgusted look from Dead Wife.

Without a word to Sweeney, Ibrahim turned to Dead Wife and said, “I wish you luck. Do not leave without me.”

The corner of her mouth quirked up, almost gentle. “We won’t. You’re our ride, Salim-not-Salim.”

“I still think we should have done the ‘go team’ bit,” Sweeney said as they watched Ibrahim cross the room to talk to the grey lady. She listened to him for a moment, and then nodded. Turning to the ghost she had been speaking with, she looked to be making her apologies before gesturing for Ibrahim to follow. The grey lady then led Ibrahim out of the other parlor door.

Or rather, she glided straight through it, leaving Ibrahim to scramble for the handle. Sweeney chuckled.

“Try harder to be an asshole, Lucky Charms,” Dead Wife said with obvious disgust.

Sweeney turned to  respond, only to realize that Dead Wife was already winding through the crowd of ghosts and people-that-weren’t, heading towards the door they’d come through. The sight of her among them made him stop, blinking. Everything was unreal in the blue light, but nothing so much as her: she looked less and less like a girl, dead or alive or anything in between. A few more hours flitting from blue shadow to blue shadow, and she would be something else entirely. A goddess, maybe, though Sweeney didn’t like to think of what kind of goddess Laura Moon would make.

One of the vicious ones, he suspected. The kind that carried swords and fucked over their worshippers, no matter how devout.

He caught up to her in the front hall. “I don’t have to try to be an asshole, Dead Wife. It comes very naturally to me.”

“Good for you. Right or left?”

“Right,” Sweeney said. “Left’s unlucky.”

She glanced at him. “Seriously, or are you fucking with me?”

He turned  right and walking towards a set of open doors he could see just ahead.

“When will you get it through your head, Dead Wife?” he called back over his shoulder. “You believe it, it’s real. Enough people say that there’s an invisible line running between Indiana and Ohio, it has power. Enough people believe that leprechauns exist, and here the fuck I am. Right is right, it means correct; sitting at someone’s right hand is a mark of favor, and in Latin, left is ‘sinister.’ Ergo, et cetera, you get the idea.”

“Yeah, but no one actually _believes_ left is unlucky anymore. Not like that.”

“Enough people do,” Sweeney said with a shrug. “And even if they don’t believe in it like a religion, they don’t have to. Humans have enough low-level belief to keep shit like that around.”

The open doors led to a ballroom, one that had obviously seen better days. The crystal chandeliers were heavy with cobwebs, laid like a shroud over the glittering blue lights; the wooden floor had been warped by water or just decay, parts of it were blackened. Even the white plaster was crumbling, exposing the brick beneath. The whole room was bathed in the same inexplicable blue light as the rest of the House, and empty except for an old console radio playing a slow, off-key version of ‘Blue Danube.’

Well, an old console radio and a giant fucking _turtle_ , somehow standing upright and dancing slowly with a woman dressed in black. The turtle dwarfed her, at least twice her size and broad as the side of a house. Her long black veil trailed onto the parquet, pooling out like an oil slick when the turtle dipped her back.

They didn’t seem to notice Sweeney and Dead Wife, too lost in their dance or each other, to realize they had an audience.

“I’ve had this dream before,” Dead Wife murmured.

“See I was thinking acid trip,” Sweeney said. “One of the bad ones, ‘66 or ‘68, those were shit years. The 20th century ones at least.”

Dead Wife looked at him sidelong, her eyebrows raised. “No way. Are you that old, you can compare centuries?”

“Old as the hills and vales. Older, maybe, depends on which hills you mean.”

They were quiet, watching the turtle and the woman in black dance to the tinny sound of the radio. There was something strangely hypnotic to it, the slow waltz, the trail of the woman’s bloody footprints on the parquet.

“They make a cute couple,” Dead Wife said dryly. She’d crossed her arms over her stomach, watching the pair dance across the floor with a strange look. There was something almost gentle about it, an unexpected softness tucked into the corner of her mouth.

“It’ll never work,” Sweeney said dryly. He couldn't stop staring, that strange softness like a kiss at the corner of her mouth. “No love could survive the lack of opposable thumbs.”

Sweeney could see Dead Wife fighting with an honest to gods smile. “Come on, if going left instead of right is unlucky, then love has to conquer all. There’s no way that I’m more of a romantic than you.”

Sweeney snorted. “Agreed. You, Dead Wife, are about as romantic as a hole in the head.”

He wondered, suddenly, if she could waltz.

Sweeney couldn’t. By the time waltzing became fashionable, he'd been centuries into immortality and had given up most anything that wasn’t fighting or drinking. The last time he’d danced in any serious way was a céilí in Boston, and it’d been dull as shit until he started a brawl during the Irish Hey. (A fight was a kind of a dance too, but at least with that one, Sweeney knew the steps—had known them, for as long as he’d known himself, and loved the bloody music he danced them to.) Laura Moon didn’t seem like the sort who’d know how to waltz either, unless waltz was a euphemism for something. But maybe she’d had the kind of parents who insisted on ballroom lessons and teaching her to use a salad fork, out of some misguided belief it would make her a lady.

Sweeney tried to imagine Dead Wife but smaller, waltzing with some pimply kid who stank of puberty. The image of it wouldn’t come together properly in his head. It was easier to imagine Sweeney himself offering out a hand, rolling his eyes at whatever cutting comment she made. The two of them lurching back and forth to the _one_ -two-three, Laura Moon telling him to just let her fucking lead. It would be a sight, what with him head and shoulders taller, and her liable to step on his toes on purpose. But not any less improbable than a giant turtle and a woman all in black, dripping blood.

Compared to that, the late Laura Moon waltzing with Mad Sweeney was almost thinkable.

Sweeney exhaled, letting the thought go. Leaning over, he nudged Dead Wife’s shoulder with his elbow. “Come on. I doubt either of them is the bartender, and we’ve got places to be.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she murmured. With a last glance at the dancers, she followed Sweeney out of the ballroom.

In the hallway, they both turned right without a word.

The next door in the hallway was shut—and locked, Sweeney confirmed by jiggling the handle. There were noises, muffled, just audible through the door, but Sweeney couldn’t make out what they were saying, or if it was speaking at all. “I can pick the lock,” Sweeney offered, but Dead Wife just laughed.

“Look, if you want to trespass, go ahead. Personally, I’m thinking the fastest way to piss off the ‘unreliable’ host would be to go through the doors he’s locked.”

She was already walking away down the hall. “That could be the bar on the other side!” Sweeney called after her. “Sounds like drunk patrons to me!”

“Sounds to me like _some asshole_ has never heard of Bluebeard!” she called back. Awash in blue light and the faint, distant strains of ‘Blue Danube’ echoing from the ballroom, Sweeney had to concede that point. He sighed, and trailed after her.

They tried seven more doors, all of them locked. Sweeney was fighting a growing sense of unease: the decor was changing, sleek modernism giving way to something more like a hunting lodge the further along the hallway they went. Dark wood, end tables set with guttering oil lamps, antlers and stuffed birds mounted on the walls. In those blue shadows, everything looked alive, and Sweeney would swear he could feel glass eyes on him, watching.

Even Dead Wife seemed to notice, drawing in closer to Sweeney every time they passed some taxidermied— _thing_. The hunting trophies were getting stranger too, the deeper into the house Sweeney and Dead Wife went: a white buck with strangely-twisted antlers, a wolf’s head larger than any Sweeney had seen, frozen in a snarl.

They turned a corner, and both Sweeney and Dead Wife stopped. To be fair, so did the hallway: the walls curved together, meeting in a bay of dark windows. Sweeney could just about make out stars past the glass, constellations too bright and too close to be from the sky as Sweeney knew it.

And there in the middle of the floor, an iron spiral staircase, stretching up through the ceiling and into shadow. Limned with blue light, it was an unearthly thing.

“I guess…?” Dead Wife breathed, drifting towards the stairs. The staircase was finely wrought, old-world craftsmanship; the railing trailed winding vines and flowers, green men sticking their tongues out from nests of of oak leaves. A silver unicorn fled a group of iron hunting dogs of the same enormous, heavy-headed breed that had met Sweeney and Dead Wife in the forest.

Dead Wife reached out, running her hand along the railing. Her fingers lingered on the unicorn, pressing against its silver flank. “Hey,” she said suddenly. “Before. You were saying that—something about faith and belief.”

Sweeney tilted his head back, peering up along the expanse of that strange, inexplicable staircase. He could only see so far, and then it disappeared into deep blue shadows. “Sure, what about it?”

“You said that humans have ‘enough low-level belief’ to keep shit around. What does that mean?”

Sweeney shrugged. “Look, people have faith in gods, right? Real faith, belief so powerful people would rather warp the world and make that shit real rather than abandon believing in it. But belief isn’t like a light switch, humans don’t turn it on and off. It leaks out. Do you think the sun will rise tomorrow?”

Dead Wife scoffed, moving past Sweeney and beginning to climb the stairs. “Of course. But that’s not faith, that’s...science, the rotation of the planet.”

Sweeney followed behind her, though he was slower, tracing his fingers along the stair railing. “Did you do the science? Have you seen the science?”

“I don’t have to,” she scoffed. “The sun has been rising every morning since I was alive.”

“And you go around believing that it will keep rising, because of that fact.”

“I don’t _believe_ it, that’s just how the world works.”

“The world works the way humans say it does. And every human walks around drowning in little beliefs—about state lines, and directions, the rising of the sun and whether the moon landing was faked. Evidence of things not personally fucking seen. You don’t have to have some personal fucking Jesus, you believe in a hundred things without even thinking you _believe_. ’That’s just how the world works,’ everyone says. There are no atheists, that’s my point.”

Dead Wife paused, one foot poised over the next step of the staircase. She glanced back at Sweeney, her eyes hooded. “So back at the state line, when I said I had no gods...?”

There was a hard edge to her voice. Sweeney snorted.

“You’ve got gods, Dead Wife, whether you want to name them or not. Indiana knows who you belong to. And since you kissed Shadow Moon with your dead lips, I have to imagine he knows you’re his as well.”

Her lip curled, and for a moment—barely that, a flash, quick as lightning—Sweeney saw fury in her. That same simmering anger from the state line, the _wrath_. “That’s some bullshit,” Laura Moon said. It was in her voice too.

“And yet,” Sweeney said. In the navy-blue light, her mouth was a wound, and for a moment Sweeney let himself pretend he hadn’t been that bolt of lightning, the fickle finger of fucking fate. That she was just dead, and Sweeney had nothing to do with it. “It _is_. It doesn’t care about you.”

Dead Wife’s eyes narrowed. She looked like she might say something more, but she just shut her mouth, dismissing it with a shake of her head.

“I never signed up for this shit,” she said, turning back and starting to climb the stairs again.

Sweeney could see the stitching at the joint of her shoulder. _Most human sacrifices don’t_ , he thought, and was surprised by the pang of regret he felt. Like a bruise, just over his ribs.

“So what about Wilbur Shaw?” Dead Wife asked suddenly. “Is he like the sun rising?”

“Nah, he was a real person once. That makes him...remembered, I guess is the best word. Not the same as belief, but close enough. If enough people remember you, you live forever in their heads. There’s power in that.”

There was a brief pause, and then: “Does that mean you were a real person once?”

Sweeney blinked. He was still staring at the stitching at her shoulder, he realized, tracing the lines of it with his eyes. “Once, maybe,” he said. “A long time ago now.”

She was quiet after that.

They kept on climbing the winding stair, with nothing but the occasional window to mark how far they had come. (The stars kept getting stranger, out the narrow windows; looking more and more like strings of Christmas lights, an artificial parody of the plow, the crown.) The higher they climbed, the light shifted from teal to blue, and then deeper, to navy—inky light that was almost not light at all. It was still enough to make out the ironwork of the stair, though, and Sweeney’s skin crawled to see the green men growing fangs, the flowers taking on too many petals. The oak leaves had taken on thorns.

He stopped dead when the iron hunting dogs caught up with the silver unicorn.

Someone had lavished attention on this scene, this one in particular—the ironwork spilled over the railing and up onto the wall, metal vines climbing like ivy. Like the metal itself was living, and had overgrown its trellis. Framed against that backdrop of leaves, the hunting dogs fell on the unicorn. Sweeney could see the whites of the unicorn’s eyes as it screamed, every individual sharp tooth buried in its flesh. Silver blood flecked the dogs’ mouths.

It was so vivid that Sweeney wondered if he’d find a stuffed unicorn’s head mounted the top of the stairs, twin to the deer and foxes below.

“Hey Ginger Minge, I think you’re going to want to see this...”

He startled, and realized he couldn’t see Dead Wife anywhere in the gloom. And she had been easy to pick out, grey and pale enough to glimmer in the dark. “Fuck,” Sweeney muttered, and took the stairs two at a time.  

He nearly skidded into her, standing there at the top of the stairs. “What could _possibly_ —” he began, but Dead Wife just raised her eyebrows and pointed.

It...wasn’t a stuffed unicorn’s head.

“Well now,” Sweeney breathed, taking a tentative step forward. “That’s a hell of a thing.”

“That’s one way of describing this creepy-ass scenario, I guess,” Dead Wife deadpanned. “I went with ‘what the fuck,’ but that's just me.”

If she could hear them swearing, the woman lying in the glass coffin didn’t stir.

The room was mostly windows, a vaulted ceiling; Sweeney glanced around the room and noted a couple unobtrusive doors, flanked by heavy crystal lamps on either side. The ironwork of the stair had followed them in, spreading like roots along the floor. The glass coffin itself was sitting on an elaborately-carved pedestal, ironwork roots tangled around it. There were flowers strewn over the surface, something that looked like bluebells; so many of them that the woman’s face was hard to make out past the greenery.

Sweeney circled the coffin in a wide arc. The woman was pretty enough, from what he could see: long brown hair in ringlets and her slim hands folded over her breast. There was a silver cross necklace threaded through her fingers, and someone had clearly put her in her nicest dress. Her expression was peaceful; there didn’t seem to be any bruising or blood. She might have been sleeping.

“I,” Sweeney said, and then stalled, not sure what else to say.

“These are aconite,” Dead Wife said, bending down to pluck one of the discarded flowers up off the ground. “They’re super poisonous. What?” she asked, at Sweeney’s look. “You’re the only one allowed to know weird shit? I was a morbid kid, I know what hemlock looks like too.”

“Strange flower to leave on someone’s grave.”

“Not if you killed them with it.”

Sweeney thought suddenly of the unicorn.

“If we’re taking a vote, I think I preferred the turtle,” Dead Wife said. She was edging closer towards the coffin, the aconite clutched in her fingers. She leaned over the glass coffin, and Sweeney was struck by the pairing of them—one dead woman pretty, flushed with faint golden light even beneath glass; the other was thin as a coat rack and greying, blue as a bruise. Sweeney wondered what it said about him that he liked his dead women still upright, mouthing off about how they never signed up for blood sacrifice.

(And then: if she was thinking that too. If Laura Moon looked at the stainless, lovely unicorn and thought maybe, she just wasn’t _trying_ hard enough. After all, with enough spite and selfish spit, a little bit of theft and wanting, you too could claw your way up from the grave.)

Gently, Dead Wife laid the sprig of aconite on top of the glass. Her hand lingered. “This is some serious Snow White shit. Do you think—”

The sound of a shotgun being pumped made them both freeze.

Habit by this point, Sweeney lifted his hands, hunching his shoulders over in an attempt to make himself look a little less a threat. No one had aimed a gun at him for nearly a hundred years, Sweeney considered bitterly. And then he met Laura Moon.

There was a delicate clearing of his throat. “I would get back, if I were you.”

Sweeney could see Dead Wife’s shoulders tense. “I understand. I’m just going to step away now, okay?” she said, holding herself very still. Slowly, she backed away from the coffin, until she was standing beside Sweeney. They exchanged a look, and Sweeney could see how tightly she was holding her jaw, the muscle in her cheek ticking.

“Can we turn around?” she asked. “We don’t want any trouble.”

There was a long silence.

“All right then,” the man finally grumbled. “Turn around, if you want. But no closer to the coffin, do you hear?”

“Got it,” Dead Wife said, still meeting Sweeney’s gaze meaningfully. Slowly, they both turned.

It was a man, though Sweeney doubted he was _only_ a man. You’d have to ignore the way his eyes glittered blue over the barrel of the rifle for that. (Sweeney had met Ibrahim’s genie before, he knew what fire-for-eyes looked like; this man’s made him think more of fairy lights, set deep into the softness of the man’s cheeks—like the strange stars outside the windows.) The ghost dog from the forest was back, standing beside the man with its teeth bared. They looked much more solid and sharp than they had among the trees.

It barked, and Sweeney flinched away.

“Who are you?” the man asked. “I don’t recognize either of your faces, and I know most everyone who frequents this establishment.”

It was strange to watch Dead Wife try for sweetness. It went against the grain of everything he knew to be true about her. “I’m Mrs. Moon, this is Sweeney. We’re just passing through, looking for some answers. Who are you?”

“He’s the host,” Sweeney said. The man didn’t give off the electrical current and stray sparks of a god, but there was serious power there, almost as much as Wilbur Shaw’s. This was a man who owned a shifting house in the ancient Indiana woods; a house where a dead woman lay in a glass coffin. “You are, aren’t you? This is your place.”

“Skiles Edward Test,” the man said, and it took Sweeney a moment to realize that was a _name_ , and not some random assortment of words. “I am the owner and keeper of the House of Blue Lights.”

“Who is she?” Dead Wife asked, tipping her head back to where the coffin sat. “Did you kill her?”

(“Why is that always your first question?” Sweeney muttered.)

“She is not dead!” Skiles Edward Test said viciously, enough that Dead Wife flinched back. “She’s my wife, I would never hurt her. She’s just resting. That’s why shouldn’t get close, why no one can touch her. She’s very tired.”

There was a silence.

“All—right then,” Sweeney said finally, his voice strangled even to his own ears. “Good on you, she’s lovely.”

This seemed to calm Skiles, because the muzzle of the rifle lowered, and he looked to the coffin with a lovestruck, nigh delirious expression. “She is,” he said softly. “She’s very beautiful. Especially when she’s sleeping.”

Dead Wife glanced at Sweeney and raised her eyebrows meaningfully. He cleared his throat. “Well, like Mrs. Moon was saying, we’re here looking for answers. You wouldn’t happen to know where the god of Indiana is?”

Skiles didn’t seem to hear the question, drifting to the glass coffin and stroking the edge of it. The blue dog trotted around him, and took a seat at the foot of the pedestal. When Sweeney tried to edge towards Skiles, it jumped up again, growling in warning.

“Right then,” Sweeney gritted out, looking back at Dead Wife. Under his breath, he added: “I think we should leave Norman Bates here alone with his wife.”

Instead, Dead Wife scowled deeper. Ignoring the dog’s warning bark, she took a defiant step forward. “Hey, did you hear him?” she said. “You said you knew everyone who came here. Has the god of Indiana showed up? Do you know who he is?”

“You remind me of her,” Skiles said. He was walking along the pedestal, stroking the coffin lid in a way that made Sweeney’s skin crawl. “She could be so...defiant. She wanted to know where the money was going. She wanted to know what I was doing to the dogs...”

Sweeney decided that was enough. He grabbed Dead Wife’s arm and steered her back towards the stairs. “Crazy is our cue to get the fuck out of here,” he muttered. “We’ll find the bartender and—”

He saw the wrath a moment too late.

She yanked her arm out of Sweeney’s grip, and sent him reeling into one of the windows with a well-placed flick of her wrist. His shoulder hit glass with a loud crack, and Sweeney’s knees gave out from under him. He slid to the ground, trying to catch his breath and dizzied with it, blinking against a vast expanse of wavering blue and cursing. (May all three Morrígna _fuck_ Laura Moon; if she got herself murdered in this nightmare house, she’d entirely deserve it.)

He just managed to straighten up again to see her stalk towards the coffin.

“Hey, _asshole_ ,” Dead Wife said, taking another step towards Skiles. “I don’t actually care what you did to your wife, or why. Fine, she’s sleeping or dead, good for her—but I need to find the god of Indiana. Tell me where he is, or you’ll be the one in the coffin.”

Skiles didn’t even look up. “Isn’t she beautiful when she sleeps?”

Wrath, Sweeney knew, was a hell of a drug. Grimnir had told him about his wolf-men, the Úlfhéðnar, who went to battle so high on bloodlust and devotion that neither fire nor iron touched them. Sweeney’s people hadn’t needed names for those crazy bastards, but the principle was the same. Wrath was a god’s weapon, like madness, like ecstasy—and like both, it made men stupid.

And now, here, it was written in every line of Laura Moon’s shoulders.

She stalked forward, and planted her hands on the glass coffin, right across from Skiles’. “I clawed my way out of a grave, suffered through hours in a taxi with this asshole, made it through the autobody shop from hell, and found my way through the woods to your shitty fucking house. _Tell me where the god of Indiana is!_ ”

When Skiles looked up, his eyes were shining blue, bright, like the heart of a flame. “I am the only god here. I would permit none to challenge me within these walls when I was alive, I will not do so now.”

Sweeney ached to the back of his teeth, but he forced himself upright, staggering to his feet. He’d been in too many fights not to know what the beginning of one sounded like, the opening strains of that bloody lovesong—Sweeney might not be able to waltz, but he knew the steps to this dance, the one-two punch and the shifting of feet. Even the dog was bristling, feinting towards Dead Wife and then circling back to Skiles. It knew what was about to happen too, and Sweeney bared his teeth at it in a rictus grin.

(Claim a couple humans in the sight of a dead man, they were yours, with all their bullshit.)

Out of the corner of his eye, Sweeney could see Skiles’ hand drift towards the rifle in the crook of his arm. “Don’t try it,” Sweeney snapped, and the hand froze.

“I’ll ask you one last time,” Laura Moon said, and her hands curled into fists on the glass. It wouldn’t take much effort for her to shatter the damn thing, Sweeney thought, and wondered if Skiles was thinking it too. “Where is the god of Indiana?”

Afterwards, Sweeney couldn’t be sure who moved first. By the time Skiles reached for the trigger, Sweeney was already in motion.

Laura Moon was small, Sweeney realized too late and amid the sudden violence of their collision. The sound of the shotgun was still ringing in the air when they hit the ground, Sweeney clutching her to his chest out of instinct. She was small, he kept thinking in dizzy waves. The whole width of her her shoulders fit between his arms—his hand was fisted in that tank top of hers, knuckles against her stomach like a too-late warning. All he could see was the back of her head, but her shoulder was digging into his chest and her legs were tangled with his and somehow, Sweeney had got a hand around her wrist. That was small too, and fragile. Cold. That was her all over, though: Laura Moon, cold as silver and unexpectedly fragile under his hands.

(Later, he’d wonder why it never occurred to him that a bullet wouldn’t have much effect—however fragile and silver, dead girls didn’t bleed out. A shotgun shell to the heart might even rattle his coin loose, set him free of her.)

Sweeney’s ears were still ringing from the shot, but not so badly he couldn’t hear the shotgun pump, shells clattering to the floor. He wasn’t sure if Skiles had more than one round on him, but Sweeney wasn’t about to find out. “ _Go_ ,” he wheezed, and shoved Laura off. She made an outraged noise and staggered to her feet, before whirling on him.

He was surprised when, instead of shouting, she grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him upright. Sweeney stumbled, but Laura Moon grabbed his arm and all but dragged him behind her to the nearest door. She practically ripped it off its hinges, before shoving Sweeney through and following after, slamming the door behind them.

“Lock—shit, does it lock?” Sweeney said between panting breaths, and Laura pivoted, breaking off the door handle with a sharp _snap_ before jamming the broken-off end into the door jamb, hard enough to splinter the wood around it. A makeshift door stop, that would keep it from swinging open on them.

“Good enough?” Laura said with an apologetic shrug.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Sweeney said, panting for breath. His knees were suddenly weak, and he collapsed against the wall; Laura watched him with wde, dark eyes, her expression hard to read. Sweeney could hear the fucking dog barking on the other side as Skiles swore furiously, pounding at the door.

It was a small eternity before Skiles’ thudding and shouts finally died down to unintelligible muttering. Sweeney flinched when the dog yelped and then fall to whining, an occasional scrape of claws at the wood. After another impossibly infinite span of time, Sweeney heard the sound of boots on stone, scuffling away. And then it was quiet all except for the harsh rasp of Sweeney’s own breathing.

Laura was still watching him with an unreadable expression.

“What happened to Bluebeard?” Sweeney finally asked, his voice unsteady. He was still short of breath. “And not pissing off the host?”

Laura’s eyes narrowed. “I could have handled him,” she said, brushing by Sweeney in a huff.

Sweeney gave a heavy sigh and pushed himself to his feet, trailed after her down the hallway. This one was just as blue as the last, but instead of ironwork or stuffed deer heads it was empty—strangely so. There were no more doors to try, locked or not; not even windows. Just inexplicable light and blank blue walls, stretching on endlessly.

“Skyler fucking what’s his name would have put you through a meat grinder,” Sweeney said. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“I could have handled it!”

“Fuck you, Laura Moon,” Sweeney said wearily. His shoulder was already growing stiff, and his ribs twinged with every step and twist of his hips. He’d bet good money that he had bruises blooming under his shirt, purple-blue all up and down his side like a sick imitation of those aconite flowers. “And give me back my coin.”

“Not until Kentucky, until resurrection.”

“Not—that one, the other one.” It was petty, he knew, but Sweeney wanted to hurt her, wanted to make her ache a little in turn. “The coin from the forest, that you took from the dog. I know you have it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Sweeney stopped dead. It took her longer to notice than he’d expected—but then, it wouldn’t really be Laura Moon if she didn’t twist the knife at every opportunity. Finally, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him several paces behind. “Oh my god, seriously?” she said. “We’re doing this now? You’re choosing to be a whiny baby _now_?”

“Give me my coin.”

“You’ve got tons of them.”

“Give me my _coin_.”

“Grow up, asshole. We still have to find the bar, since Skiles was such a fucking disappointment.”

Sweeney shut his eyes, exhaled. “Give me my coin, Laura Moon. You’ve got my gold, and I saved your—well, let’s call it your ‘unlife’ and save the argument about semantics for another day. You owe me.”

“I could have handled him. Or are you clutching your shoulder for some other reason, unrelated to that sweet lovetap I gave you?”

“Yeah, and that’s the other thing,” Sweeney said jabbing his finger at her. “We don’t have to be friends, Dead Wife, and frankly, I shudder to think what mad world has you and I being sociable with each other. But fuck you—no matter how you feel, no matter how pissed off you are, we are in this shit-stew together. You and me and Ibrahim against the wife-murdering assholes of this world, that’s what you signed up for.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings?” Laura asked. “You want us to join hands and sing fucking kumbaya, is that it?”

“I want you to pay what you owe.”

“I don’t owe you shit.”

“And you don’t have any gods, and you love Shadow Moon—I’m not interested in your never-ending parade of delusional bullshit, _give me back my coin!_ ”

Her chin came up. “No.”

Sweeney had killed men before. Some with his hands, his fists, others at the point of a spear. Still others with the bad luck he trailed in his wake, disfavor being the other side of the coin to luck. After a while, it had become easy—not even something to think about, as natural as the sun rising. The woman in the sedan was just some girl, barely even a person, and nothing special at all. He’d looked at her there, sprawled and bleeding in the grass, and seen only meat.

But Sweeney had never killed out of hatred, so strong he could taste it on his tongue. He wasn’t sure whether Laura could die—again, _again_ , a traitorous thought reminded him—but trying out of hatred of her? That would be new. (And then, another thought, quieter: he hadn’t realized how much he’d learned to like her, the mouthy asshole of a Dead Wife, until she betrayed it.)

Sweeney exhaled. “Then tell me what you told Wilbur Shaw.”

“What?”

“You owe me. If not the coin, then I’ll take what I’m owed in kind: the secret you told Wilbur Shaw. Pay the fucking piper, Dead Wife.”

“Fuck you.”

Sweeney laughed, a sound without any humor in it. “This little undead stay of execution might have given you ideas to the contrary, but debts won’t be put off forever. Dead Wife. Shit catches up to you.”

He thought he could see fear spark her eyes, just a flicker—but then she scoffed, turned away. “This is such bullshit, I’m going.”

“ _Fan ort_ ,” Sweeney growled. “Stay.” And that was petty too but still, Laura Moon froze, quick as if he’d grabbed her. He could see her shoulders hitch and then there was a beat of silence, before she turned slowly to face him.

“How did you do that?”

“Magic.”

“Bullshit.”

Sweeney shrugged, though it sent a hot spike of pain through his shoulder. “Magic, obligation, oath, geas, vow—call it what you like. Why didn’t you just walk out of Wilbur’s without paying? Why not tell him to fuck off once the taxi was fixed?”

“Because I didn’t want to get beaten to death with a tire iron, genius.”

Sweeney snorted. “Wrong. Because a debt is power, like belief—like the sun rising, like state lines. You couldn’t have walked away, even if you wanted. And you owe me, Dead Wife. Until that debt is paid, I own your rotting ass.”

She had already been looking at him with flat, dead eyes. At that, her mouth twisted in a sneer, and for a wild moment Sweeney was viciously pleased that Laura Moon was here with him, in this blackened and bitter hatred. It made him feel a little less cold, to have another body beside his in the dark.

Laura exhaled. “Fine. Fuck you, asshole,” she said. She dug her hand in her pocket for a moment, and then threw the coin straight at him, a flash of sunlit gold even in the blue hallway.

Sweeney caught it out of air, and tucked it away elsewhere. “Thank you kindly, Mrs. Moon,” he said. She rolled her eyes. “And the secret?”

She recoiled. “What? No, I gave you your stupid coin—”

“One debt repaid. Now the other.”

“And what,” she said stiffly, “debt is that?”

“Disloyalty.”

She laughed aloud, incredulous. “Disloyalty? What the fuck are you, some sort of medieval king?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Sweeney snarled, before he could quite stop himself. He swallowed and forced his voice back to something steady: “Disloyalty, Laura Moon. And my saving your unlife, if we’re counting. But I’ll give you a special deal because I like you so much: two for the price of one secret. You’re welcome.”

She was clenching her teeth, he could see the muscle at her jaw working. Sweeney smiled sweetly. “You could always try walking away again, see how that works. Once at the state line, once from me, but maybe third time’s the charm. You never know.”

He watched Laura swallow—deliberately, one of those strange affectations of living that she should have shed with her pulse. (They must have painted her for the funeral, Sweeney realized suddenly. He could see where the warm flesh-color was rubbing away beneath her jaw.)

“I lied,” Laura Moon said coolly. “All right? I said I’d wait for him while he was in prison, and I knew I wouldn’t, I knew it even when I said so. But he’d just told me he wouldn’t give me up, he’d take the whole sentence himself, so it felt like a really bitchy thing to do, to be honest just then. And I tried, okay? I really did try. I think I should get credit for that. I wanted it to be true.”

And Sweeney—

Sweeney—

It was startling, how quickly the hatred turned over to pity. It knocked the breath from his lungs, sharply as if he’d been struck. Pity, and a curdling kind of disappointment. He wasn’t sure what he had expected Laura Moon’s great secret to be, but it wasn’t that. Not something so small, so…human. That was the word he was looking for. How very human it was, that measly, grubby little truth. A woman hadn’t been faithful to her husband, and she’d lied to him about it; stranger shit happened every day, even on the ordinary side of the world.

It was the blue light. Sweeney had fallen for the trick of it, thought of her as a goddess, as something of his kind. He’d forgotten she was just a dead girl, that all her secrets were a dead girl’s secrets. (Ghosts weren’t very interesting, silver mist and paranormal activity aside. Just dead.)

“That’s all?” Sweeney asked. His voice had gone soft without his permission.

“Isn’t that enough?”

Sweeney was silent.

“What?” Laura asked, a hard edge to her voice. “Isn’t that enough?”

She was so earnest, or at least what passed for earnestness with Laura Moon—a faint glint of vulnerability beneath the veneer of bristling indignation. She seemed small again, somehow, as small as she’d been in his arms. More proof, Sweeney supposed, that every time he reached for her, Laura Moon would be less than he’d imagined. “I suppose,” Sweeney said. “If you say so.”

“I wanted it to be true,” she repeated.

“I believe you.”

They stared at one another across the blank blueness of the hall.

“Well?” Laura Moon finally asked. She kept crossing and uncrossing her arms over her stomach. “Have I paid my fucking debt, can we get out of here?”

“Sure,” Sweeney conceded. “Yeah, let’s...find the bar. I could use a drink.”

They walked on in silence.

Sweeney nearly missed the door. If he hadn’t been staring so fixedly at the walls in an effort to avoid even glancing, sidelong, at Laura Moon, he probably would have. It wasn’t a door so much as a bit of wall that kept wavering in and out of focus, flickering and jumping like an old piece of film, the closer they got. Just looking at it made Sweeney’s eyes ache, he had to keep turning his head away and blinking too much to keep himself from getting sick. But it was there, obvious as a heat shimmer.

“Do you see…?” Laura asked.

“I do, yes,” Sweeney answered, glancing at the door-that-wasn’t and then forcing himself to look away.

He and Laura both stopped a foot or two short, regarding it warily. After a moment, Sweeney sighed and shut his eyes, grinding the heels of his palms against them as though that might help with the burning. “I fucking hate this place.”

“Yeah, well,” Laura said, and then fell silent. He heard her sigh.

Sweeney looked up again just in time to see the edge of her shoe vanish into the wavering blue of the wall. Laura Moon, whose great secret was that she hadn’t ever intended to be faithful. He took a shaky breath and followed her through.

It was as quick as stepping over a threshold and it felt like nothing so much as passing through air. Then he was somewhere else—suddenly full of voices, laughter, the same sort of swing music from the parlor. It took a minute for his eyes a minute more to adjust to the new shade of blue, deeper than the others and something almost approaching natural. The blue of twilight rather than neon.

It was easier to think in it, easier to breathe.

Even with his eyes still adjusting, the shadows growing solid, Sweeney knew where he was. He had recognized it just by the sound—he’d been in too many bars, pubs, and speakeasies over the centuries not to know. Even the smell of it, the ambient noises of people laughing and the clink of glasses against wood, made Sweeney’s shoulders ease. (He knew where he stood in places like this, where there was liquor to dull the edges of the world and men could be coaxed into throwing a punch with little provocation.)

He did startle at the touch of a hand at his elbow. “We found the bar,” Laura Moon said, and Sweeney exhaled. He pried his arm from her hand.

“Yeah, I gathered that.”

“I can—”

Whatever Laura Moon had been about to say, she didn’t have the time to finish. There was a sudden shout, and then Ibrahim was there, beaming at Laura and clapping Sweeney on the shoulder as though they were _friends_. “There you are!” Ibrahim said, and Sweeney was surprised to hear something like real relief in his voice. “I thought you had gotten lost, I would have to leave without you.”

“Getting lost might have been better for us,” Laura said with a huff of laughter. “You should have seen this asshole we met—”

“I’m going for a drink,” Sweeney said abruptly, shaking off Ibrahim’s hand and setting off towards the bar. He couldn’t be around either of them right now—all their shared humanness, the way the twilight brought out the bruising around Laura Moon’s throat and that Ibrahim hadn’t shaved in a few days. He’d be better off belly up to the bar, drinking alongside the ghosts and monsters. (He could still taste it on his tongue, that vicious disappointment.)

Sweeney nodded to the scaly fucker on the next barstool and leaned his elbows on the counter, ignoring the twinge it sent up through his shoulder. After a moment, the bartender noticed him there and made her way over. She was a pretty thing, he thought with more than a tinge of desperation; not any sort of dead. He could have a drink and a fuck and then ask her where the god of Indiana lived—then he would be done, there was just Kentucky between him and being rid of Laura Moon entirely.

The bartender leaned against the counter too, mirroring his pose, and smiled.

“You look like you could use a drink, Mad Sweeney.”

Sweeney blinked at her, startled by his own name. It took him a moment more to realize he’d seen that smile before, underneath different eyes.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s Mary-of-the-Road. You still owe me twenty dollars—more, I’d imagine, with inflation being what it is.”

“Now is that any way to greet an old friend?” Mary asked, flashing both her dimples. She’d changed: the last time they’d met, she’d been sweetly plump and blonde, cornsilk in a party dress and curls. Now she was thinner, and brown—her hair hung over her shoulders in two black braids, and the party dress had been replaced by a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt with some incomprehensible logo on it.

Her smile was the same.

Mary tossed one of her braids over her shoulder. “You can put anything I owe you on my tab, old man. Or better yet, I’ll put it on your tab, and pour you some actual whiskey.”

Sweeney grinned, leaning his elbows on the bar. “Who are you calling ‘old man’? You’re nearly as old as I am, sweetheart.”

“Well, that depends entirely on when you start counting, _old man_.”

Mary flashed her dimples again, and then turned to pluck one of the bottles from behind the bar. Sweeney conceded—she had a point. They _had_ been in America the same amount of time, give or take a few decades. It made them of an age, if you didn’t count Sweeney’s years in Ireland, or the century-or-so it had taken for her to come back from the dead.

But when they’d finally met, two things alike, she was just beginning, and it had been centuries since Sweeney was new.

It was another story of Sweeney catching on too late. He’d thought she was just some well-dressed hitchhiker—it was the forties, someone hitching their way to a party wasn’t that unusual—until she slumped back in the passenger seat and sighed. “Oh,” she’d said, “you’re not human. Nevermind.” For his part, Sweeney had been pleasantly surprised to find a girl dressed for a sock hop remembered when the whole Midwest was a vast, blank territory, just over the edge of the map. He’d turned off at some all-night diner outside of Chicago and they’d split a plate of fries, talked about trees.

At dawn, she’d vanished into mist.

Sweeney had crossed paths with her a few times since, but always on the road, her thumb stuck out and a hopeful smile. Seeing her behind a bar (her eyes the color of wet stone, and serious) was strange. Like finding something out of place, not where you know you left it.

Mary set a gleaming, smudge-free glass there on the counter in front of him, and poured Sweeney a generous few fingers of whiskey. “There. On the house.”

It was...violently, distressingly blue.

Sweeney eyed it uncertainly, then looked up at Mary. “It’s good stuff,” she said with a laugh, “cross my heart. Everything’s blue here: all the alcohol, all the food in the kitchen. The oranges are blue. I like Skiles—Skiles Edward Test, he owns this place—but he’s weird about the theme.”

Sweeney reached out, and took the glass, watching the blue liquid slosh against the sides. It was vaguely nauseating, watching it slop back and forth.

“Yeah, I know about good old Skylar. We just met him,” Sweeney said, and Mary froze, her amused expression sliding away. Sweeney snorted. “Oh yeah, your boss is a real sweetheart. Took a shot at me and my—friend.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary sighed. “He’s not good with strangers. Or...anyone. It’s taken me years to build a rapport, and it’s mostly me humoring his strangeness. Do your friends want something to drink?”

“They can fend for themselves,” Sweeney said brusquely, not bothering to glance back and see if Ibrahim and Laura Moon were still there. “What are you doing here, anyhow? Last time I saw you, you were doing the ghostly hitchhiker bit in Illinois.”

She laughed. “Honestly, people just don’t pick up hitchhikers like they used to. I had to get a side-hustle, move with the times, you know how it is.”

Sweeney squinted. “You’re a thief now?”

“A—? Oh, no, a side-hustle is what the kids these days call finding extra work.”

Sweeney made a dismissive _tch_ noise. He was always behind with slang, it moved too quickly. At least swearing hadn’t changed much over the centuries. “If you say so. Why Indiana, then?”

Something like sorrow flickered across Mary’s face, but her voice was light when she answered: “I’m from here, actually. Lifetimes ago, back when I had a lifetime.” She flashed him a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

( _Does that mean you were a real person once?_ Laura had asked.)

Sweeney exhaled and lifted the glass of blue whiskey almost to his mouth, only to be unceremoniously shoved in the side. “God, you’re a ridiculously-sized person,” Laura said, pushing at Sweeney’s arm. “Move over.”

Sweeney bristled, setting the glass down again abruptly. But Laura’s shoving was—surprisingly gentle, given that she could have easily wiped the bar with his face. It was his good arm she was pushing at too, even though there was more room at his other elbow. A couple open stools, even; Ibrahim had taken one of them, and he smiled thinly at Sweeney’s curious glance.

When the silence stretched a few seconds too long, Mary cleared her throat. “Sweeney, come on, introduce your friends. I didn’t know you actually had any.”

Laura Moon had gone still as a hunted deer at the word ‘friends’, dropping her hand from Sweeney’s arm like his jacket was on fire. But when Sweeney glanced over at her, she was smirking that razor-wound smirk, nothing behind her eyes. “Yeah, Sweeney,” she said. “Introduce us. Your _friends_.”

In her mouth, the word sounded like a curse in a foreign language.

Sweeney sighed. “Fine, all right. The brown one is Ibrahim bin Irem—”

“My name is Salim.”

“—and the maggoty one is Dead Wife.”

Laura rolled her eyes. “Laura Moon.”

Sweeney gestured vaguely to Mary. “Ibrahim, Dead Wife: meet Mary-of-the-Road. We go back a ways.”

“That’s one way of putting it, I guess. I’m dead too,” Mary added, smiling at Laura in particular. “A lot of us are here, but I like that you’re wearing it on the outside. We’d call it ‘moxie’ back in my day.”

Laura’s mouth twitched uncertainly, like she wasn’t sure whether to laugh.

“Are you a saint too?” Ibrahim asked, eying Mary. “You are not a ghost, and you seem very alive for a dead woman.”

“A _saint_?” Mary laughed, glancing to Sweeney and raising an eyebrow.

“Louis and Wilbur Shaw send their regards,” Sweeney said dryly, and both of Mary’s eyebrows rose at that.

“Wow, you really have been doing a tour of Indiana’s finest,” she murmured before sighing heavily and leaning on the bar. “Well, I’m not a saint, just a sort of a ghost. She knows me, I’m guessing,” Mary said with a nod to Laura, but Laura only shook her head.

Mary smirked. “Come on, it’s a classic campfire story: a girl in a pretty dress, hitchhiking along the road...so a nice young man pulls over and gives her a ride. They flirt and talk but she’s shivering, so the nice young man lends her his jacket. Tells her to return it when he picks her up for their date the next day. But when he returns, he finds himself driving up to a cemetery, and there’s his jacket, neatly folded on a grave that says his new sweetheart has been dead for a hundred years.” Mary made a fluttering gesture with her fingers. “Oo, spooky.”

“Holy shit.” Laura breathed, and there was something almost like awe in her voice.

“You know this story?” Ibrahim asked, leaning forward to look down the bar at Laura.

Laura looked caught-out, startled at her own admission. “Yeah, I mean—like she said, kids all over tell it when they want to scare each other. It’s been in books, and…” Laura shook her head. “I never believed all that urban legend stuff, though. I thought it was just stories.”

(Everything with Laura Moon, Sweeney thought, was like playing two truths and a lie. Laura Moon knew how to make an old school-style fairy bargain, Laura Moon had read ghost stories, and Laura Moon didn’t believe in any of it. Guess the lie.)

Mary half-shrugged. “I didn’t think that leprechauns were real until I met this one. What are you, Salim?”

“A man in search of my god,” Ibrahim said defiantly. Then he faltered. “But I have...fallen in with unfortunate company.”

Mary laughed. “I don’t know, Sweeney can be pretty lucky...”

“Not lately,” Sweeney muttered. He lifted the whiskey glass to his mouth again, and before he could think much about the unnatural color, forced himself to swallow.

“It’s not bad,” Sweeney admitted, setting the glass down again and ignoring Mary’s all-too-pleased smirk. He was lying, of course he was—she had given him the good shit, the top-shelf stuff Sweeney never drank, rarely even touched. But then, he and Mary both had come from an era of water that made you sick and beer you could chew; a refined palate was more a hindrance than a help. It was a kind gesture, to share out something this good.

Pity it was that sickly blue.

“But I’m being a bad bartender,” Mary said suddenly, straightening up suddenly. “Salim, Laura, did you want something to drink?”

Sweeney drank the rest of the whiskey slowly, watching as Mary somehow produced a mug of extremely milky tea for Ibrahim before turning around and mixing Laura Moon a cocktail of embalming fluid and absinthe, garnished with a sprig of that same fucking aconite. (Sweeney wasn’t sure it was good idea to keep poisonous flowers tucked in beside lime wedges and cocktail olives, but then, what did he know.)

“If you weren’t dead already, this would definitely kill you,” Mary said with a smile, setting the glass in front of Laura.

Laura touched the sprig of aconite gently, playing with a blue-black petal. “The Dead Wife Special?” she asked dryly.

Mary laughed. “Something like that.”

Laura smiled, a ice-sliver sort of smile that flitted across her face and melted a moment later. “To dead wives, then,” she said, and lifted the glass in a mock toast before she drank.

“So what’s brought you to the House of Blue Lights anyway?” Mary asked suddenly. He forced himself to turn away from the sight of Laura Moon actually drinking something, the strange glow of the neon-blue liquid in the glass. (In the twilight of the bar, she could have been—but no, she was just a dead girl, small under his hands. He had to remember that.)

“Well?” Mary echoed. “Wilbur was never a big fan of this place, I can’t imagine he recommended just stopping by for a drink.”

Ibrahim set down his cup of tea, leaned forward. “It was Louis who told us. We are looking for...someone, and he said we might find him here.”

“He’s not wrong, most of the weird of Indiana comes through sooner or later. And if I don’t know them, I can ask Skiles if he does. Who are you looking for?”

Laura Moon’s mouth had tightened at the mention of Skiles’ name, but she still lifted her chin and said calmly: “The god of Indiana.”

“The—the _god_ of Indiana?” Mary repeated. She shook her head. “I didn’t even know we had a god. What do you want a god for anyway? You always told me they were bad news,” she said with a meaningful look at Sweeney.

He snorted, holding out his empty glass. “It’s all bad news these days.” He waited until Mary sighed, rolling her eyes, and reached for the whiskey bottle to continue: “Anyhow, we need a god because Dead Wife lived and died and was bodily resurrected in Indiana, and I need to get her to Kentucky anyway. There’s a...Shaw called it a ‘jurisdictional issue.’ She can’t cross the state line.”

Mary winced sympathetically as she poured Sweeney’s whiskey. “Any chance you can go incorporeal, Laura? I’ve been using that particular loophole for almost a century now...”

“It’s not that kind of dead,” Laura answered dryly.

Mary frowned. “What’s the god of Indiana supposed to do about it, then?”

“Make a deal,” Laura said. She sounded tired suddenly, though her eyes were still hard and the line of her mouth severe. “Grant an exception. Waive this weird claim this state has over me. I’ll do whatever it takes to let me cross over to Kentucky, but for that I need someone with enough power to make it happen.”

Sweeney looked away rather than try to parse the look on Mary’s face. It had been a good while—no, longer than that—since he’d crossed paths anyone who knew him. _Knew_ him, properly, more than just some fighty drunk or a stranger with a devilishly charming accent. Mary wasn’t a friend, exactly, but she was something approaching it: she knew him, the story that spawned him and the belief that kept him alive. It was unsettling then, to know that she’d clocked how closely Laura Moon stood, that Ibrahim had clapped Sweeney’s shoulder and taken the barstool beside him.

The rule was Sweeney went his way alone, Mary knew that too. He’d told her straight-out in that diner outside of Chicago, when she asked if she could ride with him. ( _Maybe just to Iowa, I’ve never been to Iowa_ , she’d said with a hopeful note in her voice, and it was the first time Sweeney had thought about saying yes.)

But knowing him, knowing his rule, meant Mary knew he was breaking it too—just by sitting here, Laura Moon at his elbow and Ibrahim bin Irem at his side.

“Well, I’m sorry, I don’t know any god of Indiana,” Mary finally said, and Sweeney looked up from his whiskey. “But I’m happy to ask Skiles after I close up. He’s more likely to talk to me than...”

Mary gestured to them with an apologetic grimace.

Their faces must have been a sight, because Mary crossed her arms over her stomach, her shoulders curling inward like she was bracing for a blow. “I am sorry. You can stay here for the night, if you want; there are plenty of bedrooms and Skiles couldn’t care less who comes and goes. I’ll throw in the continental breakfast too. Or—well, we don’t do a continental breakfast, but I can make eggs. And—”

“That is kind, thank you,” Ibrahim said, before Sweeney could even open his mouth. When Sweeney turned to look at him, Ibrahim was leaning forward on his elbows, and his smile was gentle. “You have been a great help, Mary-of-the-Road, and we are grateful. Aren’t we?” he added, with a sharp glare at Sweeney and Laura.

Sweeney swallowed, and forced the bitterness out of his voice. “We are. You know you’re my best girl, Mary.”

Mary smiled a small smile at that, and some of the tension bled out of her shoulders. “You always say that, old man. You’re lucky I’m not stupid enough to believe you.”

A man in a bowtie was trying to catch Mary’s attention at the other end of the bar, and so with a parting smile—this one warmer, almost enough to show her dimples—she went to serve him.

“It is very late,” Ibrahim said, in the eddy of silence left in Mary’s wake. Sometime during their conversation, the music had gone low and sad, a piano picking out dissonant notes as horns sang over it in a minor key. It made Sweeney want to drink, heavily, and not think about the bitterness in his mouth that even the whiskey couldn’t seem to wash out.

Ibrahim drained the last of his tea, and set down the cup carefully. “I am going to bed. Please do not make her feel any worse; she is being much nicer than Wilbur Shaw and if what Laura told me of your encounter with Mr. Skiles is true, we need friends in this place.”

Sweeney waved him off wearily and watched Ibrahim go, at least until he disappeared into the twilight at the back of the bar, with shadowy bodies moving in the gloom.

When he turned back, Laura Moon wasn’t looking at Ibrahim at all—she was looking at him, with some strange, half-thoughtful expression Sweeney didn’t know how to interpret. “Is there something you want, Dead Wife?” Sweeney asked, reaching for his whiskey again.

Laura’s eyes narrowed, and that, at least, he was familiar with. “Are you and her…?”

Sweeney snorted. “I don’t have to rob a grave to get my dick wet, Dead Wife.”

“And that’s not actually an answer, Ginger Minge.”

Sweeney drained the rest of the whiskey in a long swallow, already feeling the golden heat of it gathering at the back of his skull, pooling in his hands. Even the ache in his shoulder was easing away, smoothed by the sweetness of the liquor. He wondered if Mary would object to him starting trouble in her bar—he could pick a fight like this, maybe with the scaly fucker beside him. All Sweeney would have to do was throw a punch. Let blood wash the bitterness from his mouth where the whiskey couldn’t.

Laura Moon had already left him bruised; might as well collect some of his own to match.

With a glance to make sure Mary was still at the other end of the bar, Sweeney leaned over the counter and snagged the bottle of whiskey, poured himself a generous double. “Don’t worry, wifey, there’s no cause to be jealous. You’re still the only dead girl who’s had my coin inside her.”

Laura laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, sure. Definitely jealous, and not curious as to why anyone would willingly put up with an asshole like you.”

“It’s my all natural charm and good looks.”

Sweeney wondered if Laura Moon’s mother ever warned her not to roll her eyes like that, or they’d stick. (Though—did she have a mother? Sweeney had heard that certain kinds of spiders were born hungry, and immediately turned to devouring anything in sight, including mother dearest. It wouldn’t be hard to convince him that Laura was that same species.)

Laura huffed. “Seriously, though. Are you and her a thing?”

Sweeney lifted the glass of whiskey up to the light, watching it spark neon. “Fact is, Dead Wife, I don’t think I owe you the truth. Or much of anything, really. Unless I missed it, there aren’t any debts you can collect on, not from me. So I’m going to sit here and drink until I pass out or decide to pick a fight with whichever of these assholes will take me up on it. You are welcome to go fuck yourself, in the meantime.”

It was his turn to sound tired, though he hadn’t meant to. He’d wanted to be cruel.

At the very least it shut up Laura Moon, and she went quiet, picking at the sprig of aconite flowers still in her cup. Sweeney lifted his own glass to his mouth, and drank. Poured himself another double, when that glass ran dry, and repeated the process over.

He wondered if he could convince Mary to change the music—something with a drumbeat, pounding hard enough to feel it up through your skin. Sweeney’s people hadn’t used war drums, but he’d learned to like them in those early days of America, still had a taste for the fife and snare. Still remembered the people he’d killed to that music.

“You could always just tell me,” Laura said suddenly. In the twilight dusk, with her head tipped forward, her eyes were shadows carved into the paleness of her face. Sweeney couldn’t see anything in them but dark.

“And what, on Dagda’s green and fertile fucking earth, would possess me to do that?”

“I could give you a truth in return. Truth for truth.”

Sweeney abandoned his glass, and took a pull straight from the bottle of whiskey itself. It didn’t help the bitterness rising up in his throat, choking him like gorge, but at the very least it gave him something to do with his mouth other than laugh at her. “I’ve already had a taste of your truth, Dead Wife,” he said after he’d swallowed. “Forgive me if I don’t come back for seconds.”

That got her attention. Her shoulders stiffened, her chin jerking up as she turned on him.

“Are you serious? You’re the one talking about getting your dick wet and taking it up the ass—and you’re getting _judgy_ because I cheated?”

Sweeney laughed, shaking his head. “Oh Laura Moon, I judge you from a greater height than that. Now you’re ruining my drinking, so piss off.”

“What does that mean?”

Sweeney didn’t answer, preferring to take another swig of the bottle. He _was_ going to fight someone, he decided, drums or no; he wanted blood between his teeth, he wanted the lovesong singing in his ears and drowning out the world.

What he got instead was Laura pulling at his arm, forcing him to look back at her. “Hey, did you hear me? What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry your rotting little head about it.”

“No, don’t give me that bullshit, what did you mean?”

“I thought we agreed I didn’t owe you shit,” he said, flashing Laura a brittle smile. “Explanations included.”

Her nostrils flared dangerously, and Sweeney laughed at the sight, couldn’t help it. “You keep doing _that_ , Dead Wife. That’s what I mean.”

“Doing what?”

“This shit,” he said, gesturing to her face with the bottle. “Swallowing and smoking and sighing and even— _breathing_ , you keep breathing. Flaring your goddamn nostrils. And you don’t have all those warm-blooded, twitchy instincts or inveterate cravings any more, Dead Wife; those went away with your pulse. So everything you do is just _you_ doing it. Absolute freedom, and you use that freedom to pretend you’re still fucking alive.”

“Hard to forget the habits of a lifetime,” Laura Moon said coolly. Her eyes were a narrowed sliver of darkness now, even with her face so close to his. But that was the whiskey, Sweeney decided, and the blue blush of twilight, making Sweeney think of her as a goddess again—a spider, a sacrifice, a dead girl with shadows for eyes.

“Yeah, well. I keep forgetting,” Sweeney muttered, deliberately turning away to help himself to another swig of whiskey.

“Oh my god,” Laura said, loudly enough that Sweeney could see people turning to look; even the scaly fucker was now eying them curiously. “You ginormous fucking asshole. You complete and utter dick. Stop talking in riddles and just—”

From the other end of the bar, Sweeney saw Mary craning her neck to try and see what was the fuss was about. A minute more, and Sweeney was sure she’d start their way, and he certainly didn’t want to have to explain himself to two pissed dead girls. He swore under his breath, and before he could think much about it (before Laura could think about it either, which was the greater trick) Sweeney reached out and clapped his hand over Laura Moon’s mouth.

She immediately made a startled noise and grabbed at his wrist, digging her nails into his skin and raking them across his hand viciously. Sweeney refused to budge, pressing his hand even harder against her mouth. “If you draw blood, I’m not telling you shit about anything,” he gritted out.

He wasn’t sure if it was that threat, or if Laura finally noticed that they had an audience. Either way, she went still, and dropped her hands. Gave him a pointed look.

“I forgot you were just some dead girl, all right?” Sweeney said softly, and Laura blinked. Under his hand, her mouth felt like nothing; not warm or cold, just _there_ , her lips dry where they brushed up against his palm. (Her whole jaw fit in his hand, he realized belatedly. It was a strange thought to have.)

She still didn’t move, and Sweeney exhaled, relaxing some of his grip.

“That’s what I meant,” he said, and the cruelty he’d been missing before was there, dripping sweetly from his tongue. “I forgot that you’re just some bit of small-town skirt, who stumbled into all this because she married the bastard unlucky enough to catch Wednesday’s eye. That your secrets are small, a nobody’s secrets, and you keep sighing and swallowing and all that other bullshit because that’s what you are. You’re not like Wilbur Shaw, no one remembered you back into being. You’re not even like Mary—she’s a story they tell around the fire, she’s the rising of the fucking sun. You...you’re just some girl who ended up dead in Indiana.

“Now,” Sweeney added after a moment. Laura Moon’s eyes were still wide, fixed on him. “If I take my hand away, will you keep your fucking voice down?”

She didn’t even blink this time. Her expression was blank, dead as a stone mask—Sweeney wasn’t sure what to make of it. Even when he slowly drew his hand back, she did nothing, staring at him with shadowed eyes. It was unnerving, like someone had come and hollowed her out, left a doll of Laura Moon in her place.

Sweeney dropped his hand back at his side.

“See,” he said finally, baring his teeth in something he doubted looked much like a smile. “Aren’t you glad you asked?”

When Laura didn’t reply, he turned back to the glass, pouring himself what might generously be called a triple. (Ungenerously, it was a glass half-full of whiskey, enough to look almost purple in the lowering light.)

“I suppose—” Laura began, and then stopped. Her voice was unsteady. “I suppose I owe you a truth in return. For all that.”

“You can have that one on the house. Now seriously, fuck off, you’re ruining the drinking.”

There was another stilted silence. Sweeney could feel her staring, even as he lifted his glass to his mouth, swallowed. “You’re right,” Laura said flatly. “We should drink.“

“Way ahead of you,” Sweeney muttered, and helped himself to another mouthful of whiskey. It tasted like ash and salt on his tongue.

By the time Mary made her way back around to them, Sweeney had made a good few inches of whiskey disappear from the bottle and Laura had taken Ibrahim’s abandoned barstool, draining the rest of her absinthe and embalming fluid. “Another, thanks,” she said in that same flat voice, and Mary took her sweet time looking at them—first at Laura, then at Sweeney. The music had got worse as they drank, the kind of jazz you couldn’t hum because there wasn’t anything to hang a tune on, no beginning or end. It just went on and on, falling over itself like water.

“Everything all right?” Mary asked, her eyes lingering on Sweeney’s face.

“Oh, sure,” Sweeney said, with a brittle smile. He didn’t dare try to catch Laura Moon’s eye. “We’re peachy. How do you feel about bar brawls, by the by?”

Mary could go dead-eyed and cold too. “Overwhelmingly negative. I’ll get you that drink now,” she added for Laura, but her vicious look was entirely reserved for Sweeney.

Sweeney was expecting Laura to laugh at him for it, but when he glanced—quick, a split second’s look—she was still staring down at her empty glass, twirling the sprig of aconite between her fingers. Sweeney looked down at his glass and nudged it with a finger, the blue liquor sloshing against the sides; it didn’t seem as nauseating as it had at first. (He didn’t think about how Laura Moon’s face had strange shadows in the twilight. How her whole jaw had fit in his hand.)

“We’re about to start the yarn-spinning, by the way,” Mary said when she returned with Laura’s next round. “If either of you are interested.”

Laura snorted, taking the glass. “Sorry, I was never an arts and crafts sort of girl.”

“We’re not spinning actual yarn—each night at the House ends with storytelling,” Mary explained, making Sweeney blink. “Tall tales, told in the old ways...the sort of thing that went out with the radioplay and the TV dinner. You should stick around; sometimes Wisakatchekwa sings, and those songs are older than even him,” Mary said, nodding at Sweeney.

Sweeney raised an eyebrow. “You really tell stories? I’d thought that art long dead and gone.”

Mary smiled ruefully, that sorrow flickering across her face again. “Not here,” she said. “Nothing’s ever gone from here.”

It was like stumbling, strangely and suddenly, into a time Sweeney had thought long past. Not that the whole House of Blue Lights wasn’t like that, with its Moderne furniture and jazz, rotting ballrooms and hunting trophies, but—Sweeney remembered this part. This part was etched somewhere under his skin or between his ribs; he could forget all things but this, this would still be at the core of what he was, impossible to forget. He remembered this the way Grimnir remembered the first wargames held in his name, how Mary talked of that first auto trail they laid over her grave.

You never did forget your first.

Someone pulled back a part of the wall, the dark wood paneling melting away to reveal an enormous stone fireplace with a fire burning low, almost banked. It took only a few minutes for them to stoke it again into bright blue tongues of flame. But the light of it beat back the shadows, and Sweeney realized suddenly how crowded the bar was. A dozen dozen or so bodies, all strange-looking, but talking among themselves, laughing as they waited for the storytelling to start sc.

(If he shut his eyes, it could almost be a too-hot kitchen in County Antrim—a girl in a mob cap weaving tales about stealing a merrow’s _cochallin draíochta_ as she peeled potatoes. You never forgot your first, and this is what had made Sweeney, borne him to America: before all else, he’d been a story.)

“Well, that’s my cue,” Sweeney said, somehow managing to untangle himself from the bar stool. He was unsteady on his feet, but he couldn’t feel the ache of his bruises at all anymore, not even a twinge; it was all drowned in the golden warmth of the whiskey.

He looked up to find Laura Moon looking back, that strange not-expression still on her face. “You don’t want to stick around, hear the yarn-spinning?” she asked.

“I’ve heard it before,” Sweeney said, shrugging when she raised her eyebrows. “Immram and echtra, they’re all war stories or voyages. It’s the only kind of tales men know how to tell.”

“What about love stories?”

Sweeney looked away. “Like I said. Violence, and a homecoming. The only stories men know how to tell.”

He finished off the last few dregs of the sickly blue whiskey, and set the glass back on the bar. With a taut smile at Laura Moon, he turned and walked out, through a door he’d swear hadn’t been there an hour before and into the shadows and the hallways beyond. The further he went into the House of Blue Lights, the more the voices faded away—there was just that slow, sad jazz, the kind you couldn’t hum. Sweeney fell asleep to it, idly running his fingers over the bruises along his ribs and thinking of nothing, nothing at all.

 

//

 

“You look like shit, old man.”

“Top of the fucking morning to you too, Mary,” Sweeney muttered, slumping onto the bar stool and accepting the mug Mary held out to him. (The liquid in it was a sort of off-navy, but Sweeney was so tired he would have drunk motor oil if it smelled enough like coffee.) For a moment, Sweeney just sat hunched over it, breathing in and leeching whatever warmth he could through his palms.

“God, you’re wonderful,” he finally breathed, lifting the mug to his mouth. “Anyone tell you lately you’re wonderful?”

Mary laughed. Her hair was loose this morning, a dark curtain around her shoulders. She looked younger like that; it made Sweeney feel unaccountably tender toward her. “Are you talking to me or the coffee?”

Sweeney grinned weakly and then took a sip. It burned—his tongue, his throat. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted. “The other two still asleep?” he asked, not quite trusting himself to meet Mary’s eyes.

“Salim got up to pray earlier and then went back to bed. I don’t think Laura slept at all. When I closed up she was still on the patio, smoking.”

“Asshole,” Sweeney sighed, and took another scalding swallow of coffee. When he looked up, Mary was giving him a strange look. “What?”

Mary quirked a smile. “You’ve developed a taste for dead girls, Mad Sweeney. First me, now Laura Moon…”

Sweeney scoffed. “I like you a lot more than I like her.”

Mary looked at him with an inscrutable expression, studying his face as though there was something written there, something she wasn’t sure how to translate. She seemed to decide against it and shook her head. “As well you should. Especially considering how much time I had to spend with Skiles to get something out of him about the god of Indiana.”

Sweeney straightened up. “Thank fucking Bran, you are wonderful,” he breathed. “What did he say?”

“A lot, some of it was even relevant. What he _meant_ was that Indiana doesn’t have a god, at least not one you can bargain with like that.”

Sweeney sat back, startled by the sudden sharpness of his disappointment. He hadn’t realized how much he’d bought into Laura’s little fantasy, someone who would hear her and take pity, let her cross over to Kentucky. He’d begun to believe in them, whoever blessed Wilbur Shaw with eternal life and built Skiles Edward Test’s madhouse in the woods—not a benevolent god, but perhaps a fair one. One who would listen if begged, or honor a deal if bargained for. But it seemed that even Laura’s borrowed luck wouldn’t extend this far.

“Well, I’m fucked,” Sweeney sighed, picking up the mug of coffee again.

Mary crossed her arms over her stomach and looked down at her shoes, like she was pondering. “I’ve also got a name,” she said slowly. “Someone who might be able to help. But you’re not going to like it.”

“Why not?”

“She’s a witch.”

Sweeney swore, bringing the mug of coffee down hard enough to startle Mary and send coffee spattering across the counter. “Fuck’s sake, you know I hate witches.”

“I _know_ —Jesus, calm down,” Mary said. “But according to Skiles she’s the most powerful witch in Indiana, maybe the whole Midwest. If anyone knows how to break Indiana’s hold over Laura, it would be her. They call her Diana of the Dunes.”

“Fucking witches.”

“Hey, you can always leave Laura here. She’d fit right in with this crowd, and I’d look after her for you.”

There was a certain appeal in that, but Sweeney shook his head. “She has something of mine, I need it back. And for that I have to get her to Kentucky.”

Mary smiled ruefully. “Then it sounds to me, Mad Sweeney, like you’re headed for the Indiana dunes to meet with a witch.”

Sweeney picked up the coffee cup, and took another long draft. It was still too hot, and it burned as he swallowed. He sighed, setting it back on the bar. “I guess I am, then.”

Mary sketched out the directions—and then again, a different route, when Sweeney told her they had to stick to back roads. (“Don’t ask,” he said, when she raised her eyebrows. “It’s a long story, and I come off like shit in it.”) Sweeney drank the rest of his coffee, committing each turn and side-street to memory, whatever Mary could give him about gas stations and greasy diners where no one would look twice at their strange little group stumbling out of a battered taxicab.

He did turn down the offer of breakfast, though. The prospect of blue eggs made his stomach turn.

Their conversation had turned to mocking Sweeney in earnest—”I have _not_ turned into a fucking greaser.” “Oh, so your hair just does that naturally, then?”—by the time Laura Moon made her appearance. She stumbled in and stopped dead in the doorway, looking around like she wasn’t sure where she was; it took her a few moments more to catch sight of Sweeney there at the bar with Mary, and make her way towards them.

“This place looks different in the morning,” Laura called out, threading through the small forest of chairs, upside-down on tables. She wasn’t wrong, and not just because of the rearranged furniture, the fire that had been shut up behind the wood paneling. It was the quality of light coming from the windows, a blue so pale it was almost white. Sweeney would have assumed that the House of Blue Lights lived in perpetual night, with its weird stars—but here was morning after all.

Laura drew closer, and Sweeney could immediately smell the cigarettes on her, the smoke in her hair. It was strong enough, almost, to hide the stink of dying.

“Did you sleep?” Sweeney asked as she took the bar stool next to his.

Laura Moon smiled, that same razor-wound of a smile that made her eyes look dead even in the faint blue light of the morning. “Not like I need to, right? Turns out ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ isn’t actually a thing.”

Mary made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a laugh being hastily turned into a cough.

“So, do we have a plan?” Laura asked, glancing between Mary and Sweeney. “Did Skiles talk, did he say where the god of Indiana is?”

It was interesting to watch Laura’s expressions shift across her face as Mary explained about the witch. Like seeing storm clouds chased across the sky. Sweeney’s people had believed you could tell the future in the heavens—their holy men had filled stone bowls with clear water, and studied the sky that way, looking for omens in the wind, the thunder, the shapes of clouds. Sweeney wasn’t sure if anything had come of all their scrying; he had never known any holy man’s word to come true but St. Ronan’s, and curses were a different sort of animal.

Curses were like black sucking tar, or maybe acid: they stuck, they ate away whatever stood in their way. Curses made shit _happen_. It was much more effective, it turned out, for humans to impose their will on the world than try and guess what it was going to do apart from them.

(Sweeney wondered if Laura Moon counted as a curse.)

The rest happened very quickly after that. Sweeney developed a new appreciation for that fact that Laura Moon had intended to rob a casino and convinced her husband to go through with it—once the woman had a plan, she was a step or two below a force of nature. Sweeney would have had more luck fending off a twister than resisting Laura Moon as she swept through the House, waking up Ibrahim and all but shoving Sweeney from his barstool. Ibrahim’s protests that he would like coffee, please, especially if he is about to drive, were ignored as Laura herded them both out of the bar like a particularly aggressive sheepdog.

Mary, useless as she was, only laughed when Sweeney threw her a desperate look, and followed on behind. “Is she always like this?” Mary asked, watching with amusement as Laura gave up shepherding and stomped ahead, muttering darkly how slow they were.

“She’s always _something_ ,” Sweeney muttered, and was immediately horrified by how fond he sounded, saying it. (Mary, less useless, let this pass unremarked upon.)

It didn’t take them long to find that blue parlor again. It too was different in the daylight: the gramophone sitting silent and all the lights turned out. Aside from a young woman in a rumpled flapper dress, snoring from where he’d curled up on one of the modern sofas, all was still. “Is it always so quiet here in the day?” Ibrahim asked. He kept yawning, rubbing at his eyes.

“What self-respecting house would be haunted in the daylight?” Mary answered, smiling as they followed Laura through to the familiar front hall, with its rows and rows of doors. “No, things like us only come out at night. Morning is for the living.”

The morning beyond the House of Blue Lights was clear, with the lingering chill of rain that must have passed in the night. In the morning, the field was a greyish sort of gold, filtered through paleness and weak sunlight. “How long were we…?” Sweeney asked, but Mary shook her head.

“It’s not that kind of place. Time might run a little funny at the House, but a night is still just a night and this is just tomorrow.”

She flashed him a wan smile, and then Mary set off across the field toward the treeline. Sweeney watched her for a beat, maybe two—he missed the skirt and poodle curls, he really did—then followed after. He could hear Ibrahim and Laura Moon moving just behind him, bodies whisking through the long grass.

The forest was smaller in the daylight: just some spindly trees, underbrush, and all of it pale green in the grey of the morning. There was a sort of preternatural stillness to it that made Sweeney uneasy, only occasionally interrupted by birdsong and the sound of sirens far off. As though to remind them of the city, the world beyond the wood.

“At the House of Blue Lights, it didn’t rain,” Laura said suddenly. When Sweeney looked back, she was brushing a hand along the top of a low bush; the branches shivered, scattering of droplets to the ground. “I was outside the whole night, there weren’t even clouds.”

“It’s a world within the world, not beyond it?” Sweeney guessed. Mary flashed him a smile over her shoulder and Sweeney snorted. “Of course it is.”

“What does that mean?” Ibrahim asked.

Mary glanced back at him again, her eyebrows raised. “If I tell it, you’ll just interrupt.”

Sweeney sighed dramatically, enough to make Mary laugh. “Fine, it’s like this:  it takes power to create somewhere where the laws of physics don’t touch. To make a hundred years seem like a day, to build a racetrack up into the sky...you have to get past the edges of the world, and stake a claim where those rules don’t apply. Much easier to find a little pocket of space where it never rains. There’s loads of them, if you know where to look.”

“Places where it never rains?” Laura said.

“Or where it’s always the same crisp November evening, or where sunflowers grow year round, or that song you hate gets mysteriously stuck in your head,” Mary listed off wistfully. Sweeney wished he could see her face. “You’ve probably driven through one before, or skirted the edges of one; they’re easy to ignore if you’re not looking.”

“Worlds within worlds...” Ibrahim murmured. He shook his head, smiling to himself. “That is a miracle.”

(Again, that shiver of power, like blood between Sweeney’s teeth and the smell of incense. It was almost enough to make Sweeney jealous of Ibrahim’s genie—what would it be like, to have a man of faith have faith in you?)

A couple early-morning hikers gave them strange looks as they passed. Sweeney imagined his little trooping party did look a sight: one tired-looking brown girl in a sweatshirt, followed by a red-headed giant, an Arab man still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and a rotting corpse, cursing as she tried to light a cigarette. They probably gave off the impression they’d just come from burying a body. Or worse.

There could be bodies buried in these woods, Sweeney considered levelly, eying the packed earth at his feet. More than just Skiles’ wife in her glass coffin. The dead were everywhere in America, after all; in the ground and under the roads, potters’ fields and Indian burial grounds tilled under for housing developments and office buildings. Sleeping bones, picked clean by the fishes. Dead men speaking in dead tongues on America’s money. Sweeney remembered when spirit photographs were all the rage; and then, later, when picnics in cemeteries were the great American pastime.

That one hadn’t stopped, Sweeney supposed: he’d met La Catrina outside of Tucson not long ago, walking in colorful procession to the cemetery. She’d regarded him coolly, with more disdain than curiosity, but he’d tipped his hat to her as she passed, trailing marigolds and the smell of resin.

Sweeney glanced sidelong at the corpse beside him. Laura Moon was trailing nothing but cigarette smoke, a few flies. (Maybe Mary was right, he had developed a taste for dead girls. He seemed to keep finding himself in their company—even if the one beside him was nothing more than that.)

Laura caught him looking, and raised her eyebrows. “What?”

Sweeney only shook his head, and went back to thinking of nothing but the trees.

The sky was somewhat brighter by the time they reached the parking lot, even if the sun was still veiled in grey. The walk through the woods hadn’t taken half as long as the night before, but Sweeney wasn’t much surprised by that. He could pull the same trick if you gave him a wet fen laid thick with fog, a traveller who’d been unlucky enough to fall asleep and let his lantern gutter. It took power to warp the world, that was true, but it was laughably easy to play with the human sense of it. ( _If they weren’t perpetually confused as to what is and what isn’t, how else could they have conceived of gods?_ Renard the Fox had once told Sweeney, laughing. That French bastard had been very into existentialism and amphetamines back then; Sweeney had taken him at his word.)

Mary stopped where the path gave way to the asphalt of the parking lot. “This is as far as I go,” she said with an apologetic smile. “Traditionally, morning to turns me to mist; I have to stay close to the House.” So they exchanged their goodbyes there—Ibrahim, gracious, kissed Mary’s hands and made her laugh; Laura, less so, just smiled thinly and thanked her in an awkward, aborted fashion.

Sweeney mostly stared at the minivan sitting the parking lot, the _‘PROUD PARENT OF A CARMEL HIGH HONORS STUDENT’_ bumper sticker, trying not to fidget.

Finally, Mary to face him, hunching her shoulders a little and burying her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. Her smile was rueful. “Well. It was good to see you again, old man.”

Sweeney almost wished for one of Laura’s cigarettes, just for something to do with his hands. “Of course it was, I’m a fucking delight.”

She laughed at that, some of the awkwardness bleeding out of her as she ducked her head. She’d laughed like the first time he’d told her he was a leprechaun—no, really. The memory made some unfortunate part of him suddenly weak, and he was struck by the urge to ask her to _come with_. To the dunes and even to Kentucky, to Wisconsin after. There was room enough in the taxi—with another creature like him around, Sweeney might not be so tempted to paint Laura Moon as a goddess, to consider Salim-not-Salim a man of faith, with all the power that implied. He could go back to considering them nothing more than gadflies, something to be swatted that died too soon.

But Mary was very young in that moment, made even smaller by the quality of light, how much baggier the sweatshirt seemed by daylight. Her eyes were tired. She hadn’t even made it out of her first century, a minor not-quite-goddess of the highway who had yet to see Idaho. She didn’t deserve the war Sweeney was determined to fight, to be pressed into Grimnir’s service and meet her end in Wisconsin. She was better off here, standing beneath the green trees and listening to the old songs, the old stories around the fire.

Sweeney exhaled shakily, and let the vision of it go. “I am grateful, in case I haven’t said that yet. You’ve given me and mine quite a gift, Mary-of-the-Road, and for that I owe you a debt.”

“Then do me a favor?” Mary said, not quite meet Sweeney’s gaze. “Before you leave for Kentucky, lay some flowers on my grave. Not for me, you understand, but—no one remembers the names of those I shared it with. Maybe if someone remembered...”

“It won’t be the same,” Sweeney said. He could feel his nails digging into his palms. “As a person remembering, someone properly alive. You know that, it can’t be the same.”

“I know,” Mary said with a rueful smile. Her dark eyes flickered up to his. “But you’re the closest thing I’ve got right now, Mad Sweeney, and you do owe me.”

Sweeney ducked his head, scuffing his toe against the grass. That early morning chill, the last of a lingering rain, was sitting against the back of his neck; it was making him shiver, aware of his own skin. It seemed he couldn’t stop promising things—to genie-fucked taxi drivers and dead girls and gods. What was one more bargain, and for such a small thing?

He sighed. “Right, then. Tell me where.”

She did, and then Mary-of-the-Road went up onto the balls of her feet and kissed him gently. It was a chaste kiss—an oath-maker’s kiss, the way Sweeney had been kissed as Suibhne, when he was king. Something in his expression as Mary stepped back again must have struck her as funny, because she laughed. “Don’t look so upset. It’ll all turn out just fine, you’ll see.”

It was Sweeney’s turn to laugh, though his was bitter. “That is not the way my luck goes these days, sweetheart.”

“I’ll make you another bet, then. Twenty dollars it all turns out.”

In the grey of the morning, she looked so very young.

Sweeney forced himself to smile, something gentle. Approaching sincere, even. “Fine. Twenty dollars. And don’t think I won’t collect when this all goes to shit.”

Mary-of-the-Road smiled, deep enough to show her dimples. For a moment, he imagined he saw her eyes flash blue, blue as the sky, like they had been once in a diner outside of Chicago. “See you on the road, Mad Sweeney.”

Sweeney watched her walk back into the trees, wondering if that was a curse or a blessing.

 

//

 

Sweeney had been Suibne Geilt and newly born to immortality when he met Beowulf. The Swede was already centuries old by then, but they were king-heroes in that same stretch of cold northern sea—their meeting was inevitable. (Also, Beowulf had found Suibne’s drunken rants about Christianity amusing. But if anyone asked: the first thing.) Beowulf had called him Thorstan the Red, and Suibhne had pretended it didn’t bother him; in that way, they’d spent a few weeks in Na Scigirí, drinking a lot of what passed for alcohol the thirteenth century, and talking of poetry.

Sweeney’s memory of those days was thready and wavering—his memories of being Suibhne, especially before coming to America, often were. But he still remembered the kennings: ring-giver and mother of monsters, corpse-maker, hell-bride. The whale’s road, that was the sea, and the soul lived in a bone house, carrying tales.

A whole poetry of naming, to inscribe the world.

Now, in the backseat of a taxi with New York plates, Sweeney was thinking of _rādwērig_. Journey-weary. Beowulf had talked of it with long sea voyages, staring out at the line of the horizon day after day after fucking, unbearable day; the bone-deep exhaustion of it settling over you like death’s shroud. Suibhne had never ventured further than St. Moling’s, but nodded as wisely as though he understood.

Sweeney understood. He’d come to America in a ship’s belly, all those days of rocking with the sea, and he hadn’t stopped wandering since. That was what you did, when you were basically, in essence, immortal. You wandered. It was easy in America, the black road never ended and you could follow it forever, into the West. At the start, Sweeney thought he might have been searching for something, something he’d lost, though even now Sweeney couldn’t say what it was. He’d mostly given up looking for it.

Now he was only tired, road-weary. Death waited for him Wisconsin, but that was starting to feel like a place he would never see—like the Otherworld, or New Hampshire.

Sweeney turned his face towards the taxi window, and breathed in. They had opened all the windows once they made it past Logansport, praying for relief from the smell of turned meat and shit, two men who hadn’t washed in a couple days. Even so, the air of the taxi was too warm, too close. It felt almost like a sickness, as though this strangeness and tension was something they could sweat out.

“You are both very quiet,” Ibrahim said suddenly, glancing sidelong at Laura, and then meeting Sweeney’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Did you sleep badly, or are you fighting? Usually when you are fighting, you are very loud. I do not know what to do when you are quiet.”

“Slept badly,” Sweeney said. He caught Laura’s eye in the rearview mirror, but her expression was unchanging and blank, empty as fog. She could have been looking straight through him to the silver paper behind the mirror, and whatever backwards world lived there. She could have been seeing nothing at all.

Sweeney looked out the window again.

“I am sorry I asked,” Ibrahim sighed, and turned off at sign reading _GAS STATION, 3 MILES_.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Like all great stories, almost everything here is a blend of fact and fiction. Special credit to the Indiana State University Folklore Archives, which has the collected first-hand transcriptions of the many, many local legends and bits of oral folklore I used to flesh out this piece. In particular, you’d be surprised how many people have encountered the hitchhiking ghost girl of the Midwest. Her name is almost always some variation of ‘Mary’ (‘Resurrection Mary’ in Chicago, ‘Mary Ruth’ in Allen County) and she is always wearing a white dress.
> 
> Misery, Indiana is not a real place and neither is Wilbur’s Automotive—however, Wilbur Shaw was a real mechanic, as well as among the most famous winners of the Indy 500, president of the Indianapolis Speedway, and auto tester for "Popular Mechanics." The rest of the Misery mechanics are famous race drivers from Indiana who died in or because of various horrible auto crashes: Bill Cummings, Louis Schneider, and Pat O’Connor.
> 
> The House of Blue Lights is a mixture of fact and fiction. Skiles Test Park, Indianapolis, was once the property of eccentric Indianapolis millionaire, Skiles Edward Test, whose favorite color was blue and put up elaborate Christmas decorations every year—including blue lights. His home’s strange architecture, relative seclusion, and intense security gave birth to rumors that he kept his late wife in a glass coffin inside the house, surrounded by the eerie blue lights. In reality, he had three wives, all of whom were fine and actually outlived him. But he did have 109 pet cats and dogs, whom he buried in carpeted caskets under brass name plates, so….definitely a weird dude.
> 
> “Diana of the Dunes” was the nickname given to real-life mathematician, writer, and survivalist Alice Mabel Gray. At thirty-four and tired of her monotonous office job in Chicago, or having fallen out with her prominent father (stories differ) she packed up and moved to the Indiana Dunes. There, she lived a primitive, solitary life, writing about the dunes as part of the burgeoning preservationist movement and skinny dipping in Lake Michigan. (Hence the name, after the myth of Diana and Actaeon.) She later married, and according to rumor he was violent and abusive, a suspected murderer; she eventually died of kidney failure, complicated by blows to her back and stomach.
> 
> Legend says that you can see her ghost, running naked through the dunes she loved.
> 
> The "Grave in the Middle of the Road" is a real cemetery in Johnson County, Indiana. Ms. Nancy Kerlin Barnett is really buried there, and legend has it that when the county came to pave the new road, Nancy's grandson protected the spot by staying at her graveside with his gun. He won, and the road was paved around the gravesite. However, construction crews redoing the road in 2016 dug it up, and found an unexpected seven additional bodies buried at that same spot. They are still being identified.
> 
> Finally, Rome, Indiana, is a real place; however, not all roads lead there. Not even the ones in Indiana. (There is also a Rome City, IN. Same deal.)


End file.
